Welcome to the second edition of the BrowserStack device features blog series! Here's the link to the first one in case you missed it.

As promised, we'll share the latest device features designed to help Dev and QA teams increase their test coverage across mobile devices in this series.

In this blog, we will focus on testing SIM-enabled use cases on real devices.

We’re excited to announce that now you can test your mobile app and web workflows with physical SIM-enabled devices. You can ensure that your users have a seamless experience logging in or making payments on your app and test OTP/SMS-based use cases.

The SIM device testing feature is available across Live, App Live, Automate, and App Automate and is supported across the globe. It is available across Android and iOS devices.

How Does It Work? 🔍

Before we talk about the scope of testing opportunities unlocked by this feature, let’s dive into how it works.

  1. Once you login into BrowserStack solution - let's consider App Live, go to the App Live dashboard, and upload or install your app.
  2. You would be able to see a list of devices, click on the 'With SIM' tab.

3. The device listing displays the list of SIM and eSIM (iOS only) enabled devices, with device names, OS versions, phone numbers, and network service providers.

4. Select the device to launch your test session. During your test session, you can view the device SIM information by clicking on the device name in the App Live vertical toolbar.

Real-World Use Cases for SIM Testing

Now that you have a brief idea of how to access SIM information on BrowserStack real devices, let’s explore different use cases possible with SIM-enabled devices -

Mobile Payments 📱💸

As per a report by GSM, global mobile money registered accounts rose to 1.6 billion and transaction volumes hit $1.26 trillion in 2022 alone. This just goes to show the scope of mobile payments and why QA teams across the globe are more invested than ever to ensure that their mobile transactions are safe, secure, and successful. With BrowserStack, you can test entire mobile payment workflows including OTP validation and biometric authentication from any part of the globe.

Transaction Processing 📱💰

Most banking and financial institutions have OTP verification to ensure the security of the transactions. Now, you can test the same with physical SIMs available on BrowserStack devices. Ensure your users can securely make payments across the web and mobile apps via OTP-based authentication enabled with the relevant contact number associated with the SIM on your device.

Login and Signup 🔐💻

A lot of apps today, such as Uber, MakemyTrip, and Gmail, need OTP verification when you create an account, log in for the first time, or log in via a new device. This is also called two-factor authentication or 2FA. With BrowserStack, you can test workflows that require OTP-based authentication to allow login and signup on your app.

Here’s a sneak peek into how it works -

Password Reset 🔐🔄🔒

To ensure security, most apps need 2FA for a password reset. This is especially relevant for mobile banking apps and broadly the BFSI industry. With BrowserStack SIM testing, you can test your app’s password reset workflow to ensure users don’t get stuck when they want to change their password.

SIM Binding 📲🔗🔒

Now you can also test app workflows that require SIM-based authentication to make sure your users are protected against scams.

SMS Messaging 💬📱📨

In a world where you get SMSs on anything from retail sales, and hair salon discounts to financial transactions and government notices, it’s unrealistic to expect that your app usage wouldn’t be interrupted by an SMS. What’s more, it might fit right in your product wheelhouse to run SMS-based drip campaigns for your target customers. With BrowserStack, test international MO and MT SMS delivery and all related technical features. You can also test automated SMS campaigns to ensure that they work as expected on your mobile app.  

With BrowserStack SIM functionality, you can access and test on devices with physical SIMs or e-SIMs. These functionalities are available across our manual and automated testing products and on both Android and iOS devices.

At BrowserStack, we are devoted to helping our customers build and deliver best-in-class software and make mobile testing more robust and comprehensive.

What Our Customer's Say 👥 🤝

Here’s a quick read on what our customers feel about BrowserStack device features

OLX Autos is a mobile-first company today, and considering the ever-growing variety of Android and iOS devices in the market, cloud-based testing is the only solution. The way BrowserStack is helping us to scale, especially in automation, is commendable.

Ravinder Singh, QA Team Lead, OLX Autos

With BrowserStack, we get stable results. We run 30 tests on 4 versions of iOS and 4 of Android. Because we have been running our mobile tests on a wide variety of devices and OS combinations on a nightly and weekly basis, we have caught issues before release and done hotfixes. We are able to catch regression issues that weren’t possible before unless we repeatedly did manual testing on our regression builds.

Vidya Sundararaman, QA strategist for front-end applications, Q2 E-banking

We're thrilled to share our latest features with you and hope you find them exciting and valuable!

Learn more about SIM-based device features on -

Live | App Live | Automate | App Automate

Stay tuned to learn more about how you can leverage these features to ensure holistic mobile testing, broader test case coverage, accelerated bug resolution, and lightning-fast shipping cycles.