Genymotion Cloud: Everything you need to know

I have written about Genymotion before, but Genymotion Cloud is a completely new beast, offering a solution for members of a team to work on the same project simultaneously. In my own experience with teams, it is very hard to work on the same project along with your fellow teammates.

Genymotion Cloud promises to alleviate these issues allowing for teams to work on the same project at the same time while also offering great cloud based features. There are a few key ways Genymotion Cloud allows this to happen. Let’s break each of these down.

Automation

The first feature that Genymotion Cloud enables is automation. This allows the team to automate testing of their app using cloud based Android virtual machines (hence the name “Genymotion Cloud”) that works with Android Studio which allows for testing of “hundreds of devices”, as Genymotion says, with no limits whatsoever.

This is a great feature, as it is basically impossible to test every use case, especially if you only own a couple of devices. Using Genymotion Cloud, a team can test as many devices as possible making sure nothing goes wrong on certain devices.

Collaboration

This is my personal favorite feature of Genymotion Cloud, allowing for teams to work on the same project at the same time. As I mentioned earlier, this is something that I have been struggling with teams that I am currently on.

Genymotion compares the collaboration feature to Google Docs, noting that this includes the code itself, virtual machines and even apps. Everything is live and can be edited by anyone at any moment, even while other people are doing the same thing.

Sharing apps allows for the drag and drop of APKs from the desktop to the virtual machine by just dragging the APK over the virtual machine to install, this is a very helpful feature for quick app installs without having to sideload them.

One other feature is sharing a virtual machine with any email address, this means that if you need to show off your app to someone remotely, you can simply type in their email address and give a live demonstration of your app.

How does Genymotion Cloud work?

All of this is cool, but how does it work? There are few different tools and plugins that are needed for everything to work. These include:

• Gradle plugin – This allows for the selection of virtual devices you want to run before starting your tests. This requires the use of GMTool, which is also included with Genymotion and Genymotion Cloud, more on this below.
• CI Server – Genymotion Cloud’s integrated continuous integration server allows for integration large CI Servers that your team may be already using, like Jenkins, for example. Already use an automation tool like Appium? That can also be integrated no problem! This allows for easy integration of Genymotion Cloud into your workflow with little to no hiccups, at least in theory.
• Integration with IDE – Genymotion Cloud allows the use of either Android Studio or Eclipse for your IDE. This is possible thanks to what is already possible with Genymotion for the desktop using the respective plugin.
• Java API – Application programming interfaces can really make your life a whole lot easier, especially while testing on virtual machines. Genymotion uses an example of getting sensor data off of a virtual device using their Java API. This is very convenient if you need to test certain use cases and are using an Android virtual machine. Modifying sensor data on VMs is something I do on a weekly basis, so it is nice to know that Genymotion Cloud carries over this feature from Genymotion on the desktop.
• GMTool – This is a command line based tool allowing the control and manipulation of Genymotion’s features as well as automation tools. Using GMTool and the Gradle plugin together makes it relatively easy to start a bunch of test devices to test your app. More info on GMTool can be found in Genymotion’s documentation.

What does this mean Android developers?

Well, it depends on the size of your team. A small team of just a few people will probably not see the benefit of Genymotion Cloud, but that is not really the intended audience. A larger team with a big team working on a large project will be able to immediately see the benefits if they like to work remotely and have everything updated in real time.

The best thing to do is to check out Genymotion Cloud for yourself and see if it is something that you and your team would be interested in. Unfortunately at this time, no pricing options have been given, so you will have to contact Genymobile directly.

Wrap Up

Genymotion Cloud is built off of the already successful Genymotion, offering great cloud features that can make working on a bigger team much easier. Not only will you be able to work on projects remotely in real time, you will also be able to show potential clients your app running remotely in real time as well test on hundreds of device types all in real time using an internet browser.

There are some exciting features that I cannot wait to see live, be sure to stay tuned to Android Authority for more development content!