Over the festive period in December, @michael.allison asked for recommendations on Slack of
training material as a good starting point particularly around the differences between testing on a desktop browser compare to a mobile browser.
I was wondering if people would have any resources they could share with Michael to kick off the new year with?
I don’t know what you guys are exactly looking for but maybe this can be helpful Mobile App Testing Tutorials (A Complete Guide with 30+ Tutorials)
Also, where’s this slack?
Good luck kicking off the new year 
Hey @emy.jamalian up the top of The Club, click the icon beside the house and it will take you to the Slack signup page
@emy.jamalian Curious on the mobile front of this, what current Android device in phone factor is good for testing with at the moment. I could get the S20, but it feels a waste to get a device that will only ever sit running with the appium drivers talking to it all day?
I’m going to pair it up with a new iPad2020 to cover tablet form factor on IOS, and because I have an older Android tablet already. Android Phone of choice for testing representing most remote workers devices?
@conrad.braam Currently in our company for automation for apps, we use Browserstack. not an actual device. and for manual testing we have google pixel 3. So I guess unfortunately I don’t really have the answer to your question 
@emy.jamalian , I find BrowserStack and the like appealing, but the recurring rental cost to run about 2 hours of tests every day would mean my team budget for phones would be eaten up. We normally buy a device, give it to a developer (because the simulator is good for development, but never emulates networking and security very well.) And then afterwards add it to our test farm. But it does mean I have a small stack of >8 year old phones that need recycling now too, so I tend to buy a device that will be supported with updates for longest possible, and buy high quality devices so that we can still test on OS’s that are really old (4-5 years, like the iphone 5 and 6 which are still huge in the wild)
The VPN setup required to run tests externally hosted would just do my head in. The security risk is a worry. Was it easy to agree on VPN ingress/egress for your test environment on a mobile?
@conrad.braam I might be so off cause I don’t know much about the setup but as much as I know we don’t use any VPN. with browserstack, it’s like running tests locally on our own simulator.
But you’re right, it’s an expensive service.
Sorry I wasn’t of much help
No no, not at all. I know that the cloud test providers do give users ways to connect to VPN’s but it gets tricky to make sure nothing leaks. I’m testing stuff long before it’s live. The real challenge I have is that my test framework needs to be able to connect to services that are sometimes not on the public internet for security reasons. And that our testing environments are fully functional, but are obviously configured with licensing/billing effectively disabled, which allows us to test all customer flows in automated fashion, and are thus not publicly accessible.
Every system has differing test requirements and security techniques. (Did I tell you about the day I accidentally logged into the amazon test backend and ordered some stuff for “free”?)
It depends really on your target audience and of you know the spread of devices they have.
Then you can look at boundaries, in terms of smallest and largest screen, oldest and newest version of OS. Also if it’s browser, versions of they also.
I couldn’t hope to maintain a device farm large enough to properly cover theses boundaries, this is where a service like BrowserStack, Sauce Labs or Amazon Device Farm comes in.
But it comes down to what risks you are mitigating and what behaviour you are validating.
If you need a device your hands, you are going to need to accept you can’t test a large range of devices. Don’t nobody got time for that.
If you don’t have specific data for your customers, you can use general analysis like StatCounter