Sauce Labs Buys TestFairy

March 16, 2021

Sauce Labs has acquired TestFairy, provider of an enterprise-grade, all-in-one mobile platform that helps companies streamline their development processes and release better mobile apps to market with shorter development cycles. With its third acquisition in the last three months following the earlier additions of API Fortress and AutonomIQ, Sauce Labs significantly strengthens and extends its mobile testing capabilities, enabling the company to better serve mobile developers who want real-time user feedback in addition to mobile QA teams that need a broader view of how an application works across the entire spectrum of devices.

The acquisition also accelerates the company’s efforts to build a modern test collaboration platform enabled by data. With the addition of TestFairy, Sauce Labs can provide mobile developers with immediate insight into the way real users experience a mobile app and use that information to continuously iterate and improve their applications.

“As the speed of development increases, developers need immediate insight into real-user experiences as well as the ability to harness that information into continuous iteration and improvement,” said Aled Miles, president and CEO, Sauce Labs. “On the heels of acquiring API Fortress and AutonomIQ, the acquisition of TestFairy is a testament to how Sauce Labs is moving to ensure our customers have access to all the capabilities they need to optimize their mobile initiatives and grow their digital confidence. We’re thrilled to add the people and products of TestFairy to the Sauce Labs team.”

With the addition of TestFairy, Sauce Labs now offers a broad mobile testing solution that serves the needs of even more personas in the mobile SDLC, including devs and QAs as well as support and product teams. The acquisition augments the Sauce Labs real-device cloud as well as the company’s leading emulator/simulator offering with a developer-centric mobile testing solution that enables developers to deploy beta apps quickly and get real-user feedback. The combination of Sauce Labs and TestFairy empowers both developers and QA teams to create consistent feedback loops throughout all phases of mobile development, including production.

“The pairing of Sauce Labs and TestFairy creates an ideal combination for organizations looking to address the challenges of modern mobile testing and development,” said Yair Bar-On, co-founder and CEO, TestFairy. “From day one, we have been focused on building a powerful platform mobile developers can use to immediately deploy their apps, see how users use their apps, and receive real-time feedback from real users. We feel fortunate to help so many companies build better products and we couldn’t be more excited to continue the journey as part of the broader Sauce Labs team.”

The unique requirements of mobile development

Traditional mobile testing solutions were designed to replicate the testing processes and best practices that work effectively for web applications. The world of mobile development has proven to be fundamentally different than that of web development, however, and therefore demands a complementary set of tools to support it. Mobile developers are increasingly eager to deploy beta versions of their app in such a way that they can get valuable feedback from users, iterate quickly, and maintain a consistent feedback loop. Moreover, the many variables inherent with mobile devices and mobile applications make it more difficult for scripted tests running on traditional device clouds to cover the universe of edge cases for which mobile developers need to account.

“Developers are the center of gravity for mobile testing and they need solutions that were built with their specific needs and ambitions in mind,” said John Kelly, CTO, Sauce Labs. “By adding TestFairy to its portfolio, Sauce Labs now offers the broadest mobile testing solution in the industry, one that leads with developers but also serves the needs of other personas that play a role in ensuring mobile quality.”

Streamlining mobile development with TestFairy

TestFairy allows teams to automate beta app distribution, easily manage bug reporting and crash reporting, understand customer support issues in real-time, and automatically create test automation code, all in a highly secure, compliant environment. With the TestFairy platform, developers leverage an SDK directly in their app and use the platform interface to choose the groups of users to whom they want to deploy their beta app. This enables developers to release beta versions of their applications directly to select users to get real-time feedback, thus creating a consistent and robust feedback loop that provides significantly more context, depth, and detail on how their application is functioning than they can get from traditional scripted tests alone.

Key features of the TestFairy platform include app distribution, crash reporting, in-app bug reporting, live support, remote logging, test automation, and session video recording. The platform also features a scalable cloud architecture and modular system that integrates seamlessly with any tool in the development ecosystem, including all on-prem and cloud CI/CD solutions. A secure platform built for highly compliant companies, TestFairy comes on a private cloud, is connected to Single Sign-on, and allows IP whitelists and end-to-end encryption.