Automated Mobile Testing Without Tradeoffs: The QA Wolf Approach

Most teams know their mobile end-to-end (E2E) test coverage isn’t where it needs to be. It’s a structural problem: building the right system requires access to the right environments: real devices, emulators, or simulators, depending on the application. Teams have two options: they can build and maintain an in-house lab or they can rent time on a third-party device farm.

In-house labs offer complete control, custom configurations, consistent environments, and deep debugging access. But they’re expensive to build and time-consuming to maintain. Supporting multiple devices and OS versions adds constant overhead, and keeping everything stable requires dedicated resources. In-house labs are out of reach for most teams. Most teams opt for the alternative: device farms.

Anyone who has worked with device farms knows they are slow, expensive, and annoying. A typical test run might queue for several minutes, flake halfway through, and return logs buried inside a 20-minute video with no indexing. But the reason they behave this way isn’t bad design—it’s intentional. These platforms are designed to maximize device utilization, rather than optimize test feedback. That model works fine for manual testing, but it is not suited to the demands of automation.

QA Wolf’s business is different. We don’t rent devices—we deliver working tests. That means clean state, deep system control, instant parallelism, and zero flakes. Those things sound nice for any kind of testing, but for end-to-end automation, they’re non-negotiable. Manual testers can recover from a flaky state or poke around a device to troubleshoot. Automated tests can’t. If the state isn’t clean, if the system isn’t predictable, if results aren’t consistent, the suite breaks. Fast.

Device farms can’t support that level of stability or control without blowing up their economics. So instead of forcing general-purpose infrastructure to work for automation, we built our own, explicitly designed to deliver reliable mobile test execution at scale.

The mobile automation gap

Modern mobile apps require automation that accurately reflects real user behavior across various devices, operating system versions, and edge cases. But today’s tooling doesn’t make that reliable, especially not for complex flows.

Device farms provide hardware, but not control. To make mobile test automation work on all but the smallest of scales, teams need cold boots, state resets, OS-level hooks, and support for flows like push notifications or Apple ID login. Most of that is off-limits using device farms, because enabling it would slow down reuse, and reuse drives the device farm business model.

To support manual and exploratory testing, device farms prioritize real-time access over test isolation. That means devices are reused as quickly as possible, often without full resets between sessions. For CI and dev teams, they offer just enough access to run basic functional checks, but not the low-level control needed to automate complex workflows. And to keep costs down across all use cases, they throttle resources and limit visibility into system behavior.

All of that is fine—if you’re running one-off tests by hand or automating a login screen validation after a commit. But for E2E automation at scale, it falls apart.

When teams attempt to use modern device farms for test automation, they inevitably encounter test instability. When devices get reused between tests, leftover data and timing delays can cause complex flows to fail in unpredictable ways. Failures become harder to reproduce. The test suite becomes harder to trust. That’s because device farms aren’t built for automation stability—they’re built to keep devices in constant use. Without full resets between runs, leftover app data and system state leak into tests, causing flakiness and inconsistent results.

Why we built something different

Delivering fast, accurate, and comprehensive test coverage for mobile automation requires infrastructure built for that purpose. Device farms generate revenue when the devices are in use and are designed to offer customers the most ways to use them. That means devices are shared, environments are recycled, and system-level access is limited—all of which work against the stability of automation.

We built something else. Our system is purpose-built for high-throughput, reliable, end-to-end test execution. It provides cold boots, clean state, full parallelism, and deep system control—because those aren’t nice-to-haves in automation, they’re the baseline for trustworthy results.

And because coverage isn’t just a tooling problem, we also build, maintain, and update every test to reflect how your app actually works.

Here’s what our system does:

Runs full end-to-end flows across platforms

We’re the only solution that lets you test real user journeys across Android, iOS, and desktop. Start a test case on one device and finish it on another—no problem.

Executes in full parallel without bottlenecks

Running mobile tests in parallel is tricky. Most clouds don’t fully isolate state between tests, leading to flakiness and unpredictable failures. We run each test in a clean environment on a real device or an emulator, allowing you to scale to thousands in parallel without delays or conflicts.

Provisions stable, flake-resistant environments for every test run with no lag

We run tests in controlled environments with consistent resources. That means fewer flaky results and no surprises from unstable shared device farms. Devices stay warmed and ready, so tests launch instantly with no boot or queue delay.

Increases visibility and eases debugging

When a test fails, testers get detailed info right away. They can dig into failures without rerunning entire test suites or waiting around for devices. We also support line-by-line execution to expedite debugging.

Delivers fast, reliable feedback loops on real system behavior

Thanks to parallel execution, stable environments, and efficient debugging, your team receives quick feedback, even for complex applications across multiple devices and OS versions.

How we test Android apps

Our Android cloud runs stable tests at high speed and high volume, because we designed it that way from day one. Most platforms rely on physical devices (which don’t scale) or stock emulators (which fall apart under load). We built a custom emulator stack for E2E testing at scale, fully integrated with our test infrastructure.

Isolate every test with nested virtualization
Each emulator runs in total isolation using nested virtualization: no shared hardware, no queues, no cross-test contamination.

Tune emulators for real-world accuracy
Every emulator is optimized to replicate real-world CPU, memory, and sensor conditions, ensuring consistent test behavior and making bugs easier to track down.

Scale test capacity instantly on demand
We can spin up thousands of emulators instantly. Our system grows with your test suite, without waiting for hardware or hitting quota ceilings.

Cover real behavior without physical devices
Our Android emulators are optimized for automation and support nearly all functional test cases, including navigation, network conditions, system prompts, and backgrounding. That reduces the need for physical devices, speeds up test runs, and still gives you reliable, production-relevant results.

How we test iOS apps

Simulators don’t cut it for real iOS testing. They can’t replicate hardware behavior or support critical flows, such as push notifications, system prompts, background tasks, or cross-app interactions. That’s why we run tests on real, physical iPhones—devices we own, configure, and control entirely.

Test real behavior on real devices

Our tests replicate actual user behavior on real hardware. That means reliable coverage for gesture-based navigation, system dialogs, deep links, and device-specific behaviors that simulators can’t reproduce.

Access system-level conditions with full control

Because we manage the devices directly, we can test under real-world conditions: low battery, backgrounding, location changes, throttled network, and more. No simulator hacks. No provider limits.

Execute reliably with a custom WebDriver runtime

We use a proprietary agent to run and debug tests line by line, with complete visibility into execution. That reduces flakiness, shortens feedback loops, and speeds up root cause analysis.  It also means we can cover more use cases than any other service out there.

Control the OS with re-signed iOS builds

We re-sign iOS app builds with custom entitlements, giving us control over permissions, push notification handling, and inter-app communication. That enables reliable automation of flows that break on most device clouds, including onboarding, install-time dialogs, and OS-triggered permission prompts.

Cover what others can’t. Maintain less. Ship with confidence.

QA Wolf delivers the kind of test coverage most teams think is out of reach because we built our system to handle it. We support real-world user flows, including Apple ID logins, push notifications, cross-device handoffs, camera and sensor usage, and background tasks. These are the flows that matter most—and they’re precisely what gets skipped when the test environment isn’t up to the job.

Because we built for automation from the ground up, tests run in stable, repeatable environments, and failures are easy to diagnose and resolve. Maintenance is minimal. Parallel execution removes bottlenecks. Your team gets fast feedback without burning time on upkeep.

And we do the work. We don’t just provide infrastructure—we write, run, and maintain your tests for you. That’s how we deliver more coverage, with less maintenance, and show value faster.

Device farms weren’t built for this. We were.