There are a plethora of options for mobile app crash testing, like Crashlytics, Crittercism and Bugsense. But what about before the day of the big launch?
A startup out of India’s GSF Accelerator called Little Eye Labs is looking to handle crash testing before developers go into post-production. They just launched an app and crash testing service within the last few weeks.
“We want to catch the bugs before the app reaches the app store,” said co-founder Kumar Rangarajan.
The company has built a way for developers to monitor an app’s performance on a single or a handful of devices for how it consumes memory, power and wireless data during a test-run.
Basically you either plug the phone into your computer and watch how it performs, or you can disconnect it, and observe how the app performs for a 30-minute run on these metrics through their software. Other competing products like Crashlytics instead look at crash reporting for when a developer’s app is already released, out in the wild and being used on perhaps thousands or millions of devices simultaneously.
Little Eye records what’s happening live on the screen as it monitors other less visible stats like data and memory usage. Once the test run is over, it shows charts and a side-by-side video recording that can tell developers what happened while an app was running.
“When doing app testing, you need a lot of context around what a user was doing at certain points,” he said. “You can actually deploy this in your lab, run multiple apps on a series of devices. Our main value proposition is that context; it’s the whole video aspect of it.”
Rangarajan said the closest comparable service out there is Android’s Dalvik Debug Monitor Server, which comes as a tool for developers using the platform.
“It’s very rudimentary, but what we do is more visual, advanced and easy-to-use,” Rangarajan said.
Rangarajan and his co-founders previously worked on developer tools at Rational Software, which is a company that IBM acquired for $2.1 billion back in 2003.
They have a SaaS model, naturally. A full annual subscription is about $500 per developer, and the monthly costs are roughly $50 per developer. There’s a 30-day free trial period so developers can see whether it’s useful or not.
