Google introduces Cloud Test Lab to test mobile apps, iOS notifications for Cloud Messaging

Google today announced at its annual I/O developer conference in San Francisco a new mobile app testing service called Cloud Test Lab. It’s based on the technology Google picked up through its Appurify acquisition last year.

Developers just upload apps and then use Cloud Test Lab to run tests across the top Android devices around the world. The service provides screen videos and crash logs.

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It will be available “soon,” Jason Titus, head of Google’s developer product group, told the crowd.

Google is also adding support for iOS devices to its Cloud Messaging service for sending push notifications. Users can also start to subscribe to “topics” for push notifications — basically, that provides a finer grain of notifications.

Today’s updates aren’t enormous, but they could make Google Cloud Platform a more comfortable place for apps of different types.

Google has been steadily broadening its Google Cloud Platform in competition with market leader Amazon Web Services and several other players, including Microsoft Azure and IBM’s SoftLayer. Google has made its cloud story distinct by introducing several cloud services that externalize internal Google technology — for instance, there’s Cloud Bigtable and Cloud Dataflow. Also, last year Google released its Kubernetes container management tool under an open-source license.

What’s more, Google has gone out of its way to bring cloud infrastructure pricing closer to the trajectory of Moore’s law — a key concept in the microprocessor industry stipulating that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years, and thereby cost less than its competitors.

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