BrowserStack, a leading software testing platform, has launched BrowserStack App Percy, an automated visual testing tool for mobile applications. With App Percy, developers can detect visual defects across devices and screen sizes automatically, ensuring that the user interface looks as expected on every device. App Percy is equipped with BrowserStack’s real device cloud, which offers 20,000+ real devices across 19 global data centers globally, avoiding accuracy issues of testing on emulators and simulators.
Nakul Aggarwal, Co-founder and CTO of BrowserStack, said, “App Percy is a game-changer for native app developers because it saves them from manually testing and scanning false positives. With App Percy’s AI-powered algorithm running on BrowserStack’s industry-trusted infrastructure, they can focus on fixing the visual bugs that really matter. You can effortlessly integrate App Percy into your existing DevOps workflows with just one line of change. I am very proud to say that with Percy and App Percy, BrowserStack now offers the industry’s most reliable and scalable visual testing platform.”
How to get started with App Percy?
App Percy can be quickly set up in just three simple steps:
Step 1 – Install the SDK
Step 2 – Make a one-line code change
Step 3 – Run your builds and review.
Users can incorporate visual testing into any native app, hybrid app, or style guide. By integrating App Percy with their CI environment.
After the integration is complete, App Percy captures screenshots of the application’s pages in parallel every time a user runs a commit. This eliminates the need to create functional test scripts from scratch for visual testing use cases. As a result, users can streamline their testing process and easily identify visual differences.
The App Percy dashboard is equipped with state-of-the-art features to help developers identify visual differences with bird’s-eye precision. The dashboard allows users to view visual differences specific to each device using a diff overlay, diff highlighter, and diff sensitivity settings. With just one click, users can switch between devices and compare screenshots to a baseline, ensuring that the app looks perfect on every device.
Features of App Percy are as follows:
- Automatic Diff Matching: This feature groups screenshots with the same visual change, making it easier to review builds. You can approve or request changes for all matching changes with a single click, and expand the group to inspect individual screenshots.
- Diff Highlighter: The diff highlighter is a static bar that shows where changed areas are located in a new image. It helps identify differences quickly without having to zoom in or enable the diff overlay.
- Configurable Diff Sensitivity: This setting allows you to adjust the diff sensitivity when differentiating between the base build and the head build on a project. You can choose from five values ranging from Strict to Relaxed, depending on the project’s requirements.
- Percy Visual Engine: This feature uses an AI-powered algorithm that detects changes that users care about. It streamlines image comparisons with page shift detection, anti-aliasing noise handling, intelligent text stabilization, and ignore regions.
- Page Shift Detection: This feature highlights padding diffs without affecting the entire page, highlighting only the exact pixels that cause the page shift.
- Ignore Regions: This feature allows you to ignore specific regions on a page, preventing dynamic data from causing flakiness in subsequent builds.
- Public Projects: This feature allows OSS creators and maintainers to run visual reviews transparently and provide contributors with insight into the visual impact of code changes.
- Intelligent Element Handling: This feature automatically handles and disables dynamic page elements, such as date and time on a status bar, to eliminate concerns about flakiness and instability.
- Integrated Workflows: App Percy maintains baselines, branch logic, and approval carry forwards to keep reviews in sync with workflows. You can approve all screenshots in a build, groups of matching visual changes, or individual screenshots. Once all screenshots in a build are approved, the whole build will be approved.
App Percy is integrated with several workflows, maintaining baselines, branch logic, and approval carry-forwards, keeping reviews in sync with workflows at all times. Within App Percy, users can either “Approve All” screenshots in an entire build, approve groups of matching visual changes, or approve individual screenshots. Once all screenshots in a build are approved, the entire build will be approved.
App Percy supports end-to-end testing frameworks such as Appium, Java, Python, Webdriver IO, C#, and Ruby. Public projects give open-source software creators and maintainers the ability to transparently run visual reviews while giving contributors insight into the visual impact of any given code change.
With App Percy, BrowserStack has expanded its offering for automated cross-browser visual testing to include automated visual testing for mobile applications. Developers can now manage their entire visual testing workflow from a single platform, ensuring that their applications look perfect on every device.
BrowserStack is conducting a webinar for the Introduction of App Percy on the 23rd March, 2023. Interested users can register for it right here.
