A number of my clients complain that their site does not show correctly on Android phones (News stack in particular) I don’t have an Android phone and there is no simulation option. Is there a way around this?
You might check out BrowserStack Live: https://live.browserstack.com
Addendum: BrowserStack allows for testing across many devices and OS versions, and is tested on actual devices, not simulated. Well worth it, IMHO so you don’t need to buy and maintain a large assortment of devices.
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There really isn’t a substitute for proper testing on a range of devices, on a range of platforms. There are many simulators available but most miss things more often than not. Android phones are cheap, just buy one for testing.
Before a project or client site goes live I test on two iPhones and two Android. I don’t bother now on tablets as the phones tend to pick up issues.
Another idea is to buy a cheap Amazon Fire 7 tablet. I don’t think I paid more than £30 for mine.
The Fire Tablet runs a customised version of Android and has the Silk browser installed by default.
However it’s not too much difficulty to install the Google Play Store on your Fire Tablet:
At that point, you can break-away from the limited number of apps Amazon offers in their app store, and begin downloading Android apps, like Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Brave and various others, from the Google Play Store (the main Android marketplace). All work flawlessly on the Fire Tablet hardware.
I don’t think any Android web browsers have a built-in “web developer” toolset. At least I have not seen or used any myself. However there are methods of connecting desktop web browsers (like Firefox) to a remote device over USB or a network:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/about:debugging
Therefore you can turn what is otherwise a fairly cheap tablet computer into a very capable WebDev testing workhorse.
Browser Stack that Adam gave you works very well, but it’s pretty expensive. The free trail plan only gives you like a minute to test on a device.
Do you have a clue as to what is wrong?
There’s so many different devices and screen sizes that testing every device is next to impossible.
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Thanks all I will check out your suggestions.
You typically don’t need to test at all sizes, for that simulators are fine IME. An issue normally presents the same on a 5in screen as a 6.5in.
I don’t know the stats but my guess is most on Android use Chrome, and having used Android myself for years (never used an iphone) I’ve tested issues on many androids (I’ve got about ten lying around the house) and the issues always present the same.
The only thing I find to keep an eye on with the different androids is screen height, but again, simulators are again fine.
Just to expand that, I t2cently had an issue with a scrolling modal. In the build process simulators didn’t pick it up, nor various browsers in inspect mode. Final testing before launch picked up that on Android the content didn’t scroll. Without testing on a device I’d never have discovered this.
I do find far les issues crop up at the last stage on iOS than Android. Before deployment I test on a 6 and 8 and almost never find issues.
My point is it’s impossible to test every device. Since the OP indicated that there’s a problem with “ News stack in particular” on some android devices, it might help to know what the problem is.
BTW BrowserStack is not a simulator, it does allow you to run tests on 2000+ devices. I used to have access to a “ Customised plan“ from a client. It works really well, but it’s probably overkill for most small website developers.
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I wasn’t disagreeing with you!
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