Hacker News Reader

Comment by jastanton | Hacker News Reader

Correct me if I'm wrong but does this feel pretty expensive?

> Pricing is based on device minutes, which are determined by the number of devices you use and the duration of your tests. AWS Device Farm comes with a free tier of 250 device minutes. After that you are charged $0.17 per device minute. As your testing needs grow, you can opt for our unmetered testing plan, which allows unlimited testing for a flat monthly fee of $250 per device.

View on HN

I used to work for a mobile services company. We used technology similar to this. It is NOT cheap, nor easy to build. Some places give you a web interface that connects remotely to physical devices on the other side and some nifty robotics to control the phones/push buttons/etc... This is down right affordable!

Strange, I was actually thinking the pricing was very reasonable. 250 minutes free is pretty generous and will likely be all many small developers need.

17c/minute/device is fine after that since you'll only likely need 20 minutes to test your average app against each device (and they only seem to support a handful). So $10~ to test your apps against a bunch of Amazon devices (ignoring the free 250 minutes), is fine by me.

The only reason I might look elsewhere is that other services offer a more broad range of Android devices, not just Amazon Fire stuff. So you can spin up a Galaxy S6, Nexus, Fire Tablet, etc all under one roof.

I'm guessing people will use this right before they push their first beta version, just as a quick sanity check against devices they don't already have. Most compatibility issues will probably arise from supporting pre-ICS devices and those are basically all under $250. Besides that, mostly what developers are going to be concerned with is how the app looks on different devices, having taken care of functional issues by developing on slower/lower memory devices in the first place.

Yes, but consider that is not a virtualization, is a proper device

Reply on news.ycombinator.com