Struggling with the quality of your test cases for mobile apps? If we had to make a guess, we would assume that you are generalizing a lot of these test scripts to remove the time and expenses of a physical device lab. Do you know there is a better alternative available? We seriously recommend you to consider using a cloud mobile phone.
How do you ensure the proper use of the cloud mobile phone in an era of cloud computing? Don’t worry! We have got you covered! Our article will help you understand the basics of this entire process, along with the effects of cloud computing on mobile devices. We will also go through the benefits and use cases of this workflow.
What Is Cloud Computing?
Before we straight away jumped into the implementation of a cloud mobile phone in cloud computing, we must develop a thorough understanding about what is cloud computing and why should we even bother about it in the first place.
It is the process of delivery of computer services like storage, servers, databases, networking, software, and analytics over the internet, instead of traditional local computing resources.
This means that you will no longer be hosting all these resources on a user’s personal computer or an on-premise server. The use of cloud computing will ensure that you’re centralizing your data and services in a fast data center. The major advantage of this process is that you can access all this data from anywhere in the world. Moreover, it is not locked to any single user.
Let us now divert our attention to some of the major advantages that you can have while using cloud computing:
- You can rapidly use the computing resources without any human requirement or the need of a specific service provider to act as a middle point.
- Since all the services will be available through the network, you can use any of your standard mechanisms, like browsers or dedicated applications to use them.
- With this infrastructure, multiple customers, who will be also known as tenants, will share a pool of resources. All the resources will be dynamically allocated and reallocated according to demand to ensure the most efficient use of your data.
- You have the option of rapidly scaling up or down all your cloud resources to ensure that your businesses and users are handling various forms of variability which might occur in the application development workflow.
- Finally, with this approach, all the customers and users will be paying for only that much resources that they are actually using. This is because it will adopt a pay-as-you-go model to ensure proper transparency and flexibility in the financial side of things.
Service Models Of Cloud Computing
To properly use the potential and all the services of cloud computing, you must have a definite idea about the various service models that will be available. To shed more light over this segment, we have mentioned all of them below:
- The Infrastructure as a Service model comes with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure to provide its fundamental computing resources like virtual machines, storage, and network infrastructure. With this model, you can configure and manage all the resources depending on your requirements.
- You can consider using the Platform as a Service model like the Google app engine, where you will have the hardware and software tools over the Internet. This approach will allow you to build, test, and deploy the applications without managing the underlying infrastructure that comes with it.
- And at the very end, the Software as a Service model targets everyday users and small businesses. It supports applications like Google Workspace, Salesforce, and Microsoft 365. Here, all the required modules and libraries will be supplied through the Internet and can be accessed through your regular web browser or dedicated application.
Benefits of Cloud Computing for Mobile Devices
Let us now divert our attention towards some of the major benefits that you can achieve by integrating cloud computing with mobile devices:
On-Demand Scalability and Flexible Storage
If you try to store all your photos, videos, and other data locally on your mobile phone, you will quickly realize that you have filled up the entire storage. However, with the cloud integration, you will have access to a flexible and on-demand storage solution that can scale depending on your requirements.
The implementation of the above parameter will also eliminate the expense and hassle of purchasing physical memory or deleting your existing and precious content for creating more space.
Enhanced Performance
You can use cloud-based processing power on your mobile devices to handle complex tasks like natural language processing, artificial intelligence algorithms, and machine learning implementations. While implementing all these parameters, you will not be overburdening your on-device CPU or GPU.
This means that with the proper implementation of the entire workflow, you can even use a midrange device to perform multiple high-end and complex tasks that will require traditional desktop power.
Smooth Data Synchronization
Cloud services have massively changed how you can access and synchronize data across multiple devices. For example, a user can edit a document on a laptop and continue the process on their smartphone during commute or even at a later part of the day.
The entire implementation of cloud computing will always ensure that the latest version of the document is available to eliminate any version control nightmares and ensure that you have the highest level of productivity always available to you.
Improved Collaboration
Using cloud-based mobile applications? You will automatically understand that cloud computing will improve your collaboration capabilities as well. Why, you might ask? Teams can use productivity suites like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 to co-edit the documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
You will recall that earlier, whenever you made any suggestion to a document, you had to send it to the respective owner to review these changes and make all the required adjustments. With cloud computing, you can perform all of these steps in real-time and save a lot of your efforts and resources.
Accessibility and Convenience
Finally, with the power of cloud computing, you can ensure that various geographical barriers do not impact the capabilities, compatibility, and sustainability of your application. This means all your target users can access the information through their mobile phones using cloud computing from anywhere in the world.
Based on the above argument, we can easily come to the conclusion that universal accessibility of data is one of the major benefits of cloud computing.
Major Use Cases of Cloud Mobile Phones
Now that we have developed a specific idea about the advantages of cloud computing and its integration with mobile phones, let us divert our attention towards some of the major use cases that you can easily implement with the use of cloud mobile phones:
- Media Streaming
Do you use services like Netflix and YouTube? They depend heavily on a cloud infrastructure to deliver the media content. This means that instead of traditionally downloading the entire video or audio file, you can directly stream the content in real-time from the native servers of these providers.
These streaming services also deploy various advanced infrastructures to dynamically adjust the bitrates depending on your network quality to ensure that you are having a smooth playback experience at all instances.
- App Testing
As we already mentioned in the introduction, app testing is one of the major areas that has massively benefited through the introduction of a cloud mobile phone. This is because you can use various platforms like LambdaTest to use cloud testing and verify the functioning of your applications on thousands of different devices, browsers, and operating systems using these cloud servers.
Let us further understand the role of this entire workflow using the reference of LambdaTest:
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 3000+ real devices, browsers, and OS combinations. This platform can also natively integrate various frameworks like Selenium and Appium so that you can introduce various advanced testing pieces like automated cross-browser testing and automated mobile app testing.
Interested to learn more? The following sample code will help you understand how to perform automated mobile cross-browser testing using the cloud devices farm of LambdaTest:
- Mobile Gaming
Have you gone through the current gaming industry? You will see that various cloud gaming platforms like NVIDIA GeForce now and Microsoft X Cloud will allow you to run multiple graphics-intensive video games on comparatively low-configuration mobile phones.
How is this possible? The actual processing and data rendering occurs in powerful data centers that are accessible through cloud servers. The result? The output is available as a video stream on your mobile devices, which only handles the input controls and display output.
Using this entire workflow, you will be able to transform your mobile phone into a portal for very high-end gaming without actually needing to invest into the expensive hardware.
- Productivity and Office Suites
Various popular productivity suites like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 work on the principle of a cloud mobile phone where you can store documents, spreadsheets, and presentations over the cloud servers.
Then, as per your requirements and needs, you can work from anywhere in the world to stitch between devices and collaborate with your colleagues using all these stored information. These platforms also provide you the option of automatic syncing so that everyone has the most recent version of the information at all instances.
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
You will see that there are many AI mobile apps like voice assistants, image recognition apps, or language translation models which use machine learning algorithms hosted in the cloud. By offloading the heavy computing to these servers and running complex neural networks through the Internet, you can ensure that you have all the powerful capabilities in the palm of your hands.
The Bottom Line
Depending on all our arguments regarding cloud computing and the use of a cloud mobile phone, we can say that this entire infrastructure has worked as a gateway to ensure limitless use of data and computing resources. It also played a very important role in improving the security, privacy, and regulatory considerations that cannot be overlooked in present conditions.
While you are trying to give the best convenience, innovation, and efficiency to your customers, you should also be mindful of providing the best security and privacy to build customer trust and also create a positive reputation for your brand.
In short, if you are an individual application developer, a small community contributor, or a seasoned enterprise user, cloud computing and cloud mobile phones have something to offer for all of your use cases.
