Iphone Ipad QA testing process

Question

I'm curious about how people test their apps In general.

I recently uploaded an app and wanted to reach as many iOS' as possible so i targeted it to 3.0. I did test on iphone 3, iphone 4 and 3GS but found out that there was an obscure sizing of a button image on a specific ios version.

In general how do you guys test for different versions? Do people actually keep 3, 3gs and 4. Then on each, do people test on the various versions of ios within each of the phones. Yuck, anything to make this easier?

For the simulator, each xcode download contains only latest os and hardware to target. It would be nice if it could keep older os versions on the simulator to test with, is this possible?

Answer 1

My apps are CPU demanding, so optimizing for each device is big issue for me, so I keep an 3G, 3GS, 4, a 2G iPod Touch, and an iPad around for testing.

It's not always necessary though. Most cases you probably don't have heavy, time critical code, that needs to be optimized, so an iPhone 3GS at a minimum, possibly an iPhone 4 (for high DPI testing, although the simular may be fine for this), and an iPad (if you support it) is all you need.

If you keep your device images in your XCode organizer, you can reflash your device with all the OS version you want to QA on. It really depends on what you need. Unfortunately you can't go back and find older OS versions and install them if you didn't get them before they became out of date (partly because of the checksum process that calls back to Apple after you update to a new version, that attempts to prevent downgrading or upgrading to versions with security holes).