porting from iOS to Android - how many test devices will I need?

Question

I'm making a start on porting my iphone app over to android, for information my app will consist of some basic touch/ui functions, http calls, json parsing, table/list views. No Opengl or anything that advanced.

On iOS I've had the luxury of just a couple of handsets and a speedy emulator. In order to start out developing for droid, will I need to invest in buying lots of different handsets to test on? Or do I just need to buy one or two, in the knowledge that the app will pretty much function the same across the others? Note I've tried the emulator and found it unusably slow, so will be testing on devices. Just not sure how many and which I need?

Can anyone recommend some good (popular?) devices to use for dev?

thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I developed several apps, one featured on the market, and I used to use 1 device, my own phone (a HTC Desire Z). Before that I used to develop on the first Android device the G1.

As long as it aren't games you are developing you don't need more than one device that is a bit recent. Maybe an old one to see if it's fast enough for those users.

I did however recently buy a honeycomb tablet so I could debug my app for tablet users. This was a good purchase, as a tablet is way different. But that's the same for iPhone/iPad I guess.

Really, one device will suffice, the emulator is good for the rest of the weird screen resolutions.

Answer 2

Android provides an emulator you can use to emulate different phones. I would use this for mayor development especially as it is easy to use from eclipse. And for final test two or three actual phones with different specs (see Dees answer).

Answer 3

Porting from iphone to android is not a easy one, for IOS there is not more than 3 resolution(ipod 320x480,iphone 960x640,ipad1280x800). when you come android there are many resolution and sizes so you need different graphics also.

For development definitely you need different devices so that you can debug the issues.

get some devices like Samsung, htc, motorolo which is playing a big role in android smartphones.

and also you need different Android OS version.

Answer 4

I'm currently developing an Android and iPhone app too and we only have 3 Android test devices so far. We have one of the cheapest/lowest specs phone (originally with the assumption that it'll work on better devices if it works there), and two of the better specs/newer phones with different screen resolutions. Functionality wise, I haven't had any problems after our release, but we needed the other phones to see how good/bad our design looked on other devices.

Answer 5

Just get one handset to develop with and then use a testing service to test across hundreds of devices. HTC makes some decent android phones that are reasonably priced. I would recommend getting one with a common screen size for development.