Why are real mobile devices better than Emulators and Simulators for Selenium tests?

A key pillar of our platform is mobile, specifically, the ability to test your web apps on physical mobile devices. As of August 3rd, 2017, we support automated Selenium testing on real Android and iOS devices. Physical mobile devices have several advantages when compared to Emulators:

• Test on a real environment – Testing on a physical mobile device ensures that your tests are running on real world conditions. This reduces false positives, and makes it easier to replicate bugs users are having on their devices.
• Better performance – Tests on physical mobile devices run much faster when compared to emulators/simulators, resulting in significantly faster build times. In our internal benchmarks, physical mobile devices perform up to 70% faster when compared to emulators and simulators.
• Parallel testing – By harnessing the scale of BrowserStack’s Real Device Cloud, you can run many tests in parallel, resulting in a significant reduction of your test times.

To get started with testing on physical mobile devices, check out our documentation.