Snap Inc. Emulator Summit: The Secret to Snappy Emulators
In the below video our CTO and co-founder Weiyin shares the Appetize journey, how we built a platform which allows customers to run their apps in a web browser. Appetize has a variety of use cases including marketing, help desk support, testing, and development. The platform was initially created as a web-based app builder tool, but its popularity led to its development as a standalone product. Since its inception, Appetize has grown to serve large enterprises with hundreds of servers, thousands of customers including many of the mobile app brands you love.
The goals of building Appetize are to provide instant loading, fast performance, maintenance handling, and flexibility for integration into various products or tools. Some of the Appetize features include APIs for deeper integrations, allowing customer data to be accessed within the app when necessary, and ensuring the security of the platform and data.
Initially, Appetize considered using real devices for their Android implementation but faced challenges related to hardware reliability, scalability, and security. Ultimately, the team chose to use Emulators and Simulators for their flexibility, features, and the better support from Google. Through this setup, Appetize is able to support a wide range of devices and operating system versions, offering around 70 different device combinations.
The Appetize platform utilizes some very clever technologies to implement various features such as custom network proxy, log streaming, and ADB tunnel. Appetize is also working on a new approach to mobile app automation for UI testing, which has been a significant challenge that customers have brought to the team. By deeply inspecting the UI hierarchy of apps on both iOS and Android, Appetize can now identify the elements being interacted with during user testing. This data allows developers to write and run tests in JavaScript, providing an API similar to that of website testing and recording the entire mobile journey.
