Sauce Labs Brings App Testing to the Foldable iPhone Duo

Hey, everyone. " My next guest is Anoop Tripathi. Anoop is the CTO at Sauce Labs.

com here, which is going on, oh, 12, 13 years now. " It's great to have you here. Thank you, Alan, and it's a pleasure to be here and have a chat with you.

How are you doing? Good. As we were talking off camera, I've been traveling a lot.

Mm-hmm. I've got basically maybe two or three more trips till the end of the year, and then I'll stop traveling around the holidays hopefully, and picks up again in February. But that's life, right, in this business.

Mm-hmm. Yep. Anoop, first of all, I always like to give people a sense of who they're watching.

I mentioned you're the CTO at Sauce, but give them a bit of your history. Yeah. I'll try to be brief and quick, hopefully.

So 32-plus years in the industry, worked in various domains. Started out as a firmware engineer, then did infrastructure security, internet access, applications, AI, bunch of AI stuff, and now automation. And automation in different forms.

First it was process automation, then it was foreground process, then background process, and now it's about testing automation. Love it. How long you been with Sauce?

It's almost a year and a half now with Sauce now. Mm-hmm. Very cool.

And you look- But feels like a lot more. Well, you pack a lot in in a year, year and a half. I know how it- Yes.

Yeah ... especially in AI time, right? Mm-hmm.

As I mentioned at the outset, we've been covering Sauce for a long time, and I think most of our audience is familiar with Sauce Labs. But for those who aren't, Sauce has always been sort of the leader, or a leader in testing, testing automation, using open source testing- Mm-hmm ... things like Selenium and so forth.

But like everything else, we all change with the technology. Am I right in saying what I said, Anoop, or is there kind of a new tagline focus? Well, I think we have to change.

If you don't change with technology, then what happens is we become what I call as dinosaurs of the industry. Right. And Sauce has been changing, and to not only be staying relevant, but also for customer empathy.

I believe in making sure that we are on that same journey where our customers are. So thinking ahead, trying to make sure we are a good partner for them. And so we have been inventing, we have been innovating, and then building some new and cool stuff.

So I think even if you think about the DNA of this company, our original name was SOS, Sauce, and it was based on Selenium on steroids. And people started calling it instead of SOS, they started calling it Sauce. So the founders thought about it, okay, well, this was about making Selenium work at large scale.

So they thought that, "Let's give it a much more catchy name," and that's how they actually named it Sauce Labs. And after naming it, they came up with Selenium Automation using something. So- That's a bit of a reach.

The other one worked better. But we've been to Sauce. We used to go to Sauce Con every year and do videos from there and everything down in Austin.

com. Yeah. Anoop, I wanted to today turn to, you guys recently announced support for iPhone Duo.

Mm-hmm. Let me just tell you upfront, I went to pre-order the Duo because I had pre-registered to do so, and then when I was about to put my order in, they said the phone won't be here till January 25th. And I said, "I'm not waiting.

I'm not paying for it now and waiting to January 25th. " In retrospect, I was kind of glad I did, for two reasons. Number one, I think we've all heard about the screen cracking issue, right?

Touch. Yes. Mm-hmm.

And then it gets this white line, and the hinges crack, and I'm actually shocked that Apple let that come to market because they've been working on this for a long time, and Apple being Apple, you would think they'd fix that. But the second issue might be more important long term, assuming they fix the screen issue. And that is, to really take advantage of this footprint, you need apps that are made for this footprint.

That take advantage of what it offers. Mm-hmm. And from what I've been told, there's not a lot of Duo native, if we could call it that.

Duo native apps that are doing it. And one of the reasons may be it's probably hard to test them if you didn't have the platform, though Apple probably put out some sort of test dev, a dev kind of environment. But what is Sauce Labs doing to help?

Yeah, so we follow the developer path as well, but we just take a testing mindset to it. And, so yes, there are simulators available. We have been working with their simulators from the time they were made available.

And again, in this particular case, actually Apple tried to be a little bit faster on the simulators because, otherwise their simulators typically lag, not only in the release dates, but also on the quality of the products. So, we have been on top of it, and within one week Of the simulator being released, we released a support for us in our virtual device platform for the simulators, so that customers who don't have access to devices like you, Alan, maybe if you wanted to build a cool app and send it out, you should be able to at least test using our simulator environment as well. We also do have a limited capacity of real devices.

So in our different data centers that we have made available for our customers to go and test it on the real device itself. Because what we have also seen is the simulators also have a long way to go to catch up, right, on this. This is a lot more complex device.

It's not like a typical example that we used to say Apple's selling the same T-shirt like it was before. It's just a newer T-shirt, and you have to pay like 100 bucks or 200 bucks more. This time, it's a change out there, right?

It's the display has changed, right? You have to think about, am I on the outer display? Am I on the inner display?

What happens in the portrait mode? What happens in the landscape mode? What happens if there's a partial fold that's happening on the device?

What's happening when you have split views on there, right? And the transitions between those. And most of the apps have not been designed for it.

So what we have been doing is supporting it on the real device platform. And real device, we started supporting it from day one, just like we have done for other devices in the past. Obviously, we had to go through our also hoops and challenges to procure the devices.

But, yes, we have been supporting it, right? So that's what we are doing for our customers. I think our customers can come, hopefully get a little bit more confidence.

Again, it's a journey because there is a lot of changes that have happened. I just talked about the display piece. There's a lot more than that as well.

Right. I was going to say there's user testing, display testing. Mm-hmm.

Just does it crash? Other than the display testing, though, is there anything specific to the Duo test suite? Yeah.

So, several things, right? The whole camera behavior has changed now even on this, right? If you look into it, right?

There is an under the display camera for FaceTime now, right? So the Face ID context now changes, right? You can't just use the traditional, "Oh, use Face ID for authentication" kind of a feature.

That behavior is also changing, so apps are really struggling with that, depending on how you have coded your apps, right? And then there's a touch-based ID again back into the game as opposed to the camera ID. The frameworks that you are using, that also is if you are using a Flutter framework or a React Native kind of a framework versus using either the Swift or the UI kit automation, you will have a lot more work to do to make your app adapt to this, right?

The way the display works, like you are locking in into the portrait mode or not, games are really struggling a lot to fill up the screens properly and not show the boundary and edges. So it's the controls. You have side-mounted controls on them, for example.

But it's just all over the map, right? " There's a lot of other technology changes that have come in that get associated with the display, right? Because it's not just, "Hey, I've got two simultaneous app to be displayed, that's all.

" That's just one aspect of it, right? Because they're also trying to use the real estate better now and put more controls in different ways. Accessibility area is also becoming a very challenge.

Like, how is the navigation for accessibility being tested? Because a lot of apps are rightfully designed for accessibility reasons, whether it is the voiceover or whether it's the physical accessibility issues, the screen readers and all that stuff. Those are also have what we have seen as needs to be.

In some cases, it does not translate easily from the previous version of your apps by just recompiling to the new SDK. 1 SDK, and maybe you think it's all good. No, but you still face issues where you have to go and fix your own code for those things.

It's ... Yeah. It's daunting.

Look, our audience is technical. They understand what goes into testing these things. But too many people, they'll get an app, or they'll get a new phone rather, and they just use it, and they don't even think about how hard it was to port something from the single screen mode to this new Duo mode.

And then the other thing is just from an app developer point of view, right, using your imagination to not just port what I had before into this, but to do something that's native- Mm ... right, that takes advantage of this multi-screen environment and do it. I'm going to assume knowing Sauce Labs and your support for open source and everything else, that the Duo testing is available as part of your normal.

It's not a separate, or is it a separate offering? No, it's available in the same RDC, VDC SKUs, sorry, the offerings that we have. We have not created any offering.

Obviously, with the premium divide, there is like levels of offerings, so it's part of the premium offering levels, right? But it's available to all the customers who are being on the cutting edge, right? If you're using Sauce only for legacy testing, then obviously you are on a different type of SKU.

But if you are on SKUs where you are demanding and looking for cutting edge, you'll get access to these things, right? And we are always a supporter of open source, so you can come to the open source route and get your own testing in that. We have free trials.

Not only this, we are also allowing the use of AI-based testing on this, which is very important because that's something that people are using actually, frankly, like- Yeah ... and especially with the Duo, what we have seen is customers are saying, "Oh, okay. '" And it can help you find issues and tell you, "Hey, you are pretty much there or not there" kind of a thing.

So our AI authoring tool is really helping our customers on that front as well. I love it. Anup, I want to thank you for coming here on Techstrong TV.

This was great. You can't fix the screens, though, can you, on these Duos? Not unfortunately on this option.

Not yet. If you've got a problem with your Duo screen, don't bother Anup and the Sauce Labs people. Go to Apple.

Yeah. " Work on a broken device. There's an idea.

All right. Say hello to all my friends at Sauce Labs. Keep up doing the great work that Sauce Labs does, and we'll see you soon.

All right. It's a pleasure talking to you. Take care.

A pleasure. Anup Tripathi, CTO of Sauce Labs, here on Techstrong TV. We'll take a break.

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