News

Genymotion Cloud Goes Beyond Android Emulation

• By David Ramel
• October 12, 2016

Genymobile, the company behind the popular Genymotion Android emulator, has launched a new cloud platform that adds automation and collaboration functionality beyond its traditional emulation capabilities.

Founded in 2011, the company made a name for itself by improving upon the notoriously slow stock Android emulator that came with the Android Studio IDE. It became so popular that the company claims some 4.5 million developers use the Genymotion emulator.

With the new Genymotion Cloud, the company is seeking to expand its market. The cloud offering -- which the company claims is "the first cloud-based Android platform" -- is being marketed on the strength of automation features and collaboration capabilities especially suited to enterprise app development.

Company exec Angelique Zettor emphasized the automation capabilities in announcing the cloud platform, which has been in a beta program since April.

"While we planned for a versatile cloud platform that combined collaboration and automation features in equal parts, our enterprise customers were very quick to adopt the automation features of Genymotion Cloud," said Zettor. "It was simply fascinating to see how both the constituencies at our enterprise customers -- IT as well as Engineering -- were delighted. IT saw a reduction in capital and operating expenses associated with setting up and maintaining various parts of their CI systems, whereas engineering (developers and QA) found a new solution that saved them a lot of hassle and time."

A key part of the automation functionality is integration with popular Continuous Integration (CI) platforms such as Jenkins and Bamboo for building and testing Android apps. "Genymotion Cloud allows developers to test their code incrementally, avoiding cost- and resource-intensive fixes in the future," the company said.

Other automation features highlighted by the company include:

• Multiple testing framework support: Genymotion Cloud supports a variety of testing frameworks including but not limited to Robotium, Appium, Calabash, Espresso and UIAutomator.
• GMTool command line tool: This enables developers to automate the lifecycle of cloud virtual devices.
• Genymotion Gradle plug-in: This lets users run end-to-end instrumented tests in the cloud.
• ADB Tunnel: Ability to make local ADB calls that are executed on cloud-hosted virtual devices.

Collaboration features, meanwhile, include: a live demonstration capability so app functionality can be demonstrated in a Web browser; virtual device sharing, so virtual device configurations can be customized remotely; and app sharing, which provides access to the most recent app under development, so, for example, salespeople can have potential app customers try out and test projects while they're being developed without enlisting help from developers.

"We eat our own dog food all the time and this time it was no different," said exec Arnaud Dupuis. "We have been using our on-prem Jenkins CI with Genymotion Cloud for a while now. We don't need to bother our IT with setting up and maintaining Jenkins slaves; we just reach out to our own cloud, instantiate virtual devices, connect to them and run a variety of tests using various testing frameworks! Our developers and QA are very pleased with what we have put out there."

Pricing information for Indie, Business and Enterprise editions is available here.