Take the Blue Pill: Pursuing Mobile App Testing Fidelity, Efficiency, and Accessibility with Virtual Device Farms

For more than a decade, researchers have been extensively exploring mobile app testing on virtual devices [1-9], which are software-emulated mobile devices running on commodity servers, in a similar vein as virtual machines (VM) in the cloud. Building on server virtualization, virtual devices naturally inherit the benefits of VM, such as scalability, elasticity, and cost efficiency. Moreover, virtualization enables useful features not offered by physical devices, such as service instrumentation [3], whole-system snapshot [9], and memory introspection [1,2], atop which a series of advanced testing and debugging techniques are developed.