mediumConceptScenarioMidSenior
How do you choose which devices to test on, and what will an emulator never tell you?
5 min readUpdated 2026-08-15Target archetype: Big Tech, Enterprise Captive, Product Startup
Answer
Short answer
Pick devices from your own analytics rather than from a market-share article, spread the choice across OS version, screen size, memory class and manufacturer skin, and keep real hardware for anything involving the camera, sensors, radios, battery or vendor-modified behaviour.
Was this answer helpful?
Likely follow-ups
- A crash reproduces on exactly one manufacturer's devices. How do you narrow it down?
- How would your list change for a market where mid-range Android dominates?
- What is the argument for testing on the oldest OS version you still support, rather than dropping it?
- How do you decide between owning a device lab and renting a cloud one?
Related questions
- A deep link opens the right screen when the app is in the background and the wrong one when the app was killed. How do you test for that?mediumAlso on mobile-testing and android5 min
- A Compose screen with a long list is janky while scrolling - walk through how you'd find and fix the recomposition problem causing it.mediumAlso on android5 min
- How do retain cycles happen in Swift closures and delegates, and how would you find one in an app that is slowly leaking memory?mediumAlso on ios4 min
- What does structured concurrency actually give you in Kotlin coroutines, and how does a coroutine scope leak happen despite it?mediumAlso on android4 min