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Show HN: I built testelf - app testing service for your iOS app

testelf.com

1–10 of 29 posts

Re: Show HN: I built testelf - app testing service for your iOS app

#2
OP here. I quit my full-time job almost a year ago to travel and work on startup ideas, and this is the fruit of my labor in the past six months that I hope you'll find useful. I wanted to make it easy for startups and indie devs to test their iOS applications. How does testelf work? You upload a build of your app without providing any additional instructions, and we'll test your app from a user's perspective, logging what we did or saw. The goal is to charge a flat price per test, provide good coverage and actionable feedback, and have a 36-hour turnaround time.

Over the past few months, I recruited and trained a small team of testers, developed internal testing tools, and worked with a handful of startups who are piloting our service. The service is now open for beta -- I would love to hear feedback from hackers and startups on HN who can give it a shot.

Re: Show HN: I built testelf - app testing service for your iOS app

#7
post #5

Any reason this is limited to iOS? It seems like it could extend to Android/Windows/etc. extremely easily.

Thanks for the comment! Android is probably the next platform for us if all goes well. I started off with iOS because I'm more familiar with it and it has less device variations. Extending the offering won't be trivial though. Before we start support for a new platform, we'd need to build the testing tools, develop new training materials, and acquire new hardware.

Re: Show HN: I built testelf - app testing service for your iOS app

#8
post #2

OP here. I quit my full-time job almost a year ago to travel and work on startup ideas, and this is the fruit of my labor in the past six months that I hope you'll find useful. I wanted to make it easy for startups and indie devs to test their iOS applications. How does testelf work? You upload a build of your app without providing any additional instructions, and we'll test your app from a user's perspective, loggin…

"You upload a build of your app without providing any additional instructions, and we'll test your app from a user's perspective..."

It seems like a user should have at least some idea of what the app is. For example, I'll read the first couple sentences of an app's description and look at some screenshots/video before I decide to download it. This might be something you want to consider instead of having absolutely no idea what the app is before running it, since I assume most users have at least some context when opening an app.

Re: Show HN: I built testelf - app testing service for your iOS app

#10
Congrats, looks really nice! (already forwarded to our testing team)

If you add a 'proxy layer' to your solution, that would be awesome. To explain the scenario, it is really very valuable for us app startups to see how it behaves in China, in India, in Europe, in US etc. You may keep your current system intact, and 'if' the customer desires so, you can route your connection over those proxies(from real ISS'es) from all over the world and test it 'as if...' This is really important and not so hard to implement... But sometimes, you can catch bugs and usability horrors with slow or dropped connection or some weird proxy mambo jambo played by ISS providers.

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