
Show HN: I built testelf - app testing service for your iOS app - ssong
http://www.testelf.com/
======
ssong
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.

~~~
matthuggins
"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.

~~~
Cushman
It's usually a good idea when user testing to tell testers as little as
possible about the product. It's true that real-world users have more context
than that, but it can be worth it to get more unfiltered feedback— the first
few moments you watch a user flounder to even understand what they're looking
at can be the most valuable.

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umut
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.

~~~
cstrat
I think this is a great idea too! It would be an easy upsell to international
developers.

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thomseddon
Looks excellently useful, good job. I must say the graph on the test page
([http://beta.testelf.com/builds/share/0b78d05c4f5d11e2ab5a220...](http://beta.testelf.com/builds/share/0b78d05c4f5d11e2ab5a22000a1f869a/))
is particularly wonderful, great use of D3.

Also, would be very interested to know if you have plans as to how (or if) you
will overcome the issues you would have if you wanted to scale such a bespoke
service?

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

~~~
ssong
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.

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gmig
Why is "No provisioning necessary"?

~~~
akaru
This is a good question.

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speeder
You wrote that you don't test games...

Well, I hope we can send our more non-gameish apps :)

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king_magic
This looks great, and I think it's a really good price point. $200 is quite
reasonable, IMO, for the kind of detail you guys are getting into.

Definitely going to consider this for future testing :)

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swanify
Looks great, i run a mobile app agency and we are forever having issues due to
developers not testing adequately, having some external company test would be
really useful!

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ianstallings
This is a great idea sir. I signed up and hope to hear from you guys. I can
use more eyeballs looking over our work. I really like not having to worry
about provisions.

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PanMan
How do you handle UUID signing? Do you tell me the UUID's I need to add? Just
upload seems to not work with iOS apps, right?

~~~
pooriaazimi
You can sign ipa files with your developer (private) key. There's an app
called InstaSign that I use for "testing" apps before purchasing them. You
download a cracked version, sign it with your own key (so iPad thinks YOU have
created this app, like when you do in Xcode) and see if it's worthwhile.

It's saved me a lot of money that otherwise would've wasted on scammy, buggy,
"not-working-as-advertised" apps. If you're a developer (i.e., can sign apps
and load them unto your device), give InstaSign a try.

They're probably using a similar method (as they seemingly test on
iPad/iPhone, retina/non-retina, iOS5/6 devices and it might be a bit more work
for you to add at least 6 new UDIDs).

~~~
akaru
I was wondering how you did that. How do we know you're not simply cracking
these apps to resell? It sounds a bit fishy is all.

~~~
pooriaazimi
Just to be clear, I'm _not_ with testelf!

Just wanted to point that out in case you get the wrong impression of them not
replying to your (fair) accusation :)

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tachim
Awesome! This looks super useful, I'll definitely give it a shot with my own
apps.

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thelarry
Pretty cool, I have a rough time getting my lazy friends to test my iphone
apps :/

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jplehmann
Good. I'm tired of monkeys. We need something more intelligent.

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eclipxe
This is very cool. Simple but useful. Great work!

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hariseshadri
This looks fantastic. Great work.

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shawiz
Congrats! Very useful service.

