
Mobile at Scale - teddynsnoopy
http://clayallsopp.com/posts/mobile-at-scale/
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programminggeek
I'm going to geek out here for a minute at the fact that Facebook made a
screenshot diffing tool for testing. I've been wanting to build that very
thing for a long time, but every developer I've talked to about it looks at me
like I'm crazy.

So, am I still crazy for thinking screenshot diffing might be an effective way
to verify builds?

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dirtyaura
It's a great idea. Even ability to render different views and inspect them
quickly by eye is really valuable when you have huge configuration space
(charts for example). Adding automatic diff testing on top of that is a good
idea especially when the UI style stabilizes.

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MysticFear
HTML5 is not effective at the moment, but as phones become more powerful. I
think it will take over. The same way the web app took over from desktop apps
when personal PCs and network bandwidth improved.

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camus2
> The same way the web app took over from desktop apps

You just made that up , it's not backed by any fact.

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Kiro
No fact except that it's so obvious I can't believe you're arguing against it.

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pbreit
Seems like no one's really struggling to scale mobile I suspect because 1)
usage, although large, is less intense and 2) much less goes over the wire
(usually just data, not pages).

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randartie
I think 'scaling' in this sense has less to do with data efficiency but how to
develop large-scale projects for mobile, as in efficient release cycles and
how to catch bugs before they go out into the wild permanently.

I think mobile app development has lots of similarity with 'boxed' products.
Microsoft invests a huge amount of money in its test infrastructure for its
boxed products, because once it's shipped it's very difficult to fix. I think
the mobile development community incorrectly tends to treat development more
like the web than they do a boxed product. For reference, more than 15% of
Facebook users are using a release from 2 years ago (I will try to find the
source for this info).

