"I always believe that the sky is the beginning of the limit." - MC Hammer
Testing is an important precursor to the distribution of the app via Google Play store. In this chapter, we will provide an overview of the importance of testing our Android Wear app and the tooling available for it, as well as how to automate UI testing. We will conclude the chapter with step-by-step instructions on how to get the app ready for publishing.
It does not take too long for any programmer to learn the hard and valuable lesson that testing code is as important as coding itself. Ignore that lesson and a QA team worth its salt will be sure to bring you to your knees. Testing all on its own is a topic that deserves a lot of attention. There are countless resources, including books, out there that will sell you on a wide array of testing methodologies and philosophies. Test-driven Development (TDD) is worth researching if you are new to testing.
However, all that is out of the scope of this book. In this chapter, we are more concerned about the testing tooling provided by the Android platform geared toward Wear development, as well as the test APIs that are at your disposal. Let's take a closer look at that in the sections that follow.
In the previous section, we covered in some detail how to test our app. Testing is a prerequisite for distribution, and it would serve us well to familiarize ourselves with what differentiates a Wear app in terms of quality. Check out the article from the online documentation at https://developer.android.com/distribute/essentials/quality/wear.html, which serves as a reminder in this regard.
Once we have implemented our well-designed app and tested it as much as we can, we can start preparing to distribute it to potential users. That is the focus of this section to examine how to ready and distribute our Wear apps to users through Google Play.
As we go through the process of building our release APKs using Android Studio, we find that two different APKs are generated, one for mobile and one for wearable.
Packaging a wearable app in Android Studio involves the following steps:
Replicate all permissions from the manifest file of the wearable app module to the manifest...
In this chapter, we introduced Android testing and distinguished between local unit tests and instrumented tests. We then summarized the tooling available for testing our wear apps in Android Studio before we took a brief look at how to accomplish automation with UI testing. We concluded with a discussion of the stages that must be traversed when preparing our apps for distribution via Google Play.
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