How to perform Cross Device Testing

On This Page What is Cross Device Testing?Why is C

January 20, 2026 · 10 min read · Testing Guide

How to perform Cross Device Testing

Rise in smartphone users globally, businesses must to reach a large quarry audience. Areport from Statistaindicate that as of 2023, there are6.97 billionsmartphone users in the world, which will rise to7.9 billion by 2028. People access websites through their mobile devices, tablets and desktop and wait a seamless user experience.

Hence, Cross-Device Compatibility of your website becomes crucial to ensure a seamless and consistent user experience across device on different platform. Therefore, Cross Device Testing is a must, given the opportunity size of the grocery.

This article discusses the assorted aspects of Cross Device Testing and how to perform cross-device prove on a.

What is Cross Device Testing?

Cross device examination is the process of evaluating how a web application or mobile app performs and presentation across various devices, go systems, browsers, and screen sizing. This type of testing ensures that users feature a consistent and functional experience, regardless of the device they use.

Why is Cross Device Testing required?

As the spherical smartphone market is rapidly increasing, the need to test the web application across popular device before turn it in production is inevitable. As a answer of, there are various mobile device in the market which differ in blind size, resolution, OS (Windows, iOS, Android, Linux), OS adaptation, browser, memory, mainframe, etc.

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Testing web apps under such a vast umbrella of devices is quite thought-provoking. However, is the need of the hr for any organization that wants to render a promising software application to increase its customer base.

A site or nomadic app is developed and unit tested by developer on some limited devices. However, it is the responsibility of the examiner to make sure it works as require on at least the popular and wide used devices useable in the market. Hence, is crucial for your website to be cross device compatible.

Websites are built employ different engineering such as HTML, Javascript, CSS, PHP, etc. Each browser has a different engine to render HTML pages. Chrome uses Blink, Firefox habituate Gecko, and Safari uses Webkit. By perform cross-device testing, testers should control that functionality and user experience remain the same though UI might differ in some lawsuit.

How to reach Cross Device Testing?

There are numerous combinations of screen size, resolution, OS type, OS adaptation, browser type, and browser versions available in the market. For, one has to establish a well-equipped with all the latest and legacy device across different platforms for cross-device testing.

However, it is nearly impossible for any organization to buy and maintain such a big number of devices as it will cost huge money and infrastructure to store and maintain the devices. And even if the company procures the latest devices, it must update its inventory with the upcoming models in the market along with the legacy devices in spot.

This is where one has to decide between build or buying, i.e., whether to build in-house device base or buy a subscription to a real device cloud like BrowserStack.

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So how can you achieve cross-device examination?

Below are some of techniques to achieve cross gimmick examination:

1. Using Physical Devices

By choosing the correct device, OS, and screen size combination see target user, you can make a device lab with physical devices to do cross-device testing. As there are so many gimmick models uncommitted in the market, choosing the late or about popular devices to try the application is not always a good idea.

For example, Samsung and Google Pixel Android-based mobiles are very democratic. However, Xiaomi and Oppo devices have a great market due to their pocket-friendly price. Moreover, the mobile device usage pattern too varies as the grocery changes.

Devices should be select considering the target user ’ s demographics and the kind of twist they prefer to use. Mobile ’ s OS, screen resolution, and screen sizing should also be consider, and a set of devices that has the combination of widely used OS, screen resolution, and screen sizing should be picked and used for testing.

However, it is pricey and time-consuming, both in terms of building and conserve the devices.

2. Emulators and Simulators

and can be used by the screen team to test software on the practical gimmick. It helps to run trial more quickly and easily than configure existent hardware devices.

An emulator is a hardware that enable one computer scheme (host) to behave like another calculator system (guest). It enable the host system to run software or use peripheral devices designed for the guest scheme. It can mimic the operating scheme, software, and hardware features of android device. It leverage virtual device instances with near-native capabilities and controls to adjust the quarry device ’ s settings, such as battery state, geolocation, etc.

SUSA automates exploratory testing with persona-driven behavior, catching bugs that scripted automation misses.

Testing iOS apps is challenging if you do not have an iPhone, iPad or Mac machine. Therefore, simulators are used as they create an environment that simulate the configurations and behaviour of an genuine iOS gimmick. A Simulator scarper on the Mac and behaves like a typical Mac coating while simulating iOS device.

do not take existent user conditions into account while testing, so there could be a few scenarios that might get missed during the testing.

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3. Existent Device Cloud like BrowserStack

The above two approaches can be clip consuming, eminent on budget, inefficient in some cases or non-reliable. To ensure that the application or web application under tryout works seamlessly across all the device (different desktop screen sizes, Android mobiles, Android tablets, iOS mobiles, iOS tablets and Windows device), investing in a device cloud platform is the best approach.

BrowserStack is a cloud-based web and mobile testing platform that provides 3000+ real device and browsers to test your covering comprehensively. With BrowserStack, you can examine your mobile applications across multiple devices and web coating across different desktop and mobile browsers without any virtual machine setup.

BrowserStack provides different merchandise to cater to different types of testing:

  • & # 8211; Manual Testing of Websites
  • & # 8211; Manual Testing of Mobile Applications
  • & # 8211; Automated Testing of Websites
  • & # 8211; Automated Testing of Mobile Applications
  • & # 8211; Visual Regression Testing of Websites
  • & # 8211; Visual Testing of Native and Hybrid Mobile Applications

Let us consider below 2 scenarios to test onBStackDemo website:

  1. Verify tick on “ Add to hale ” should add the particular to haul.
  2. Verify tick on the cross icon on cart pop-up should remove the item from handcart.

Below is the demonstration of utilize Live and Automate products for screen the above scenarios.

How to execute Cross Device Testing Manually habituate Live?

BrowserStack Live allow you to do Cross Device Testing manually across existent browsers, desktop, and mobile devices, through simple steps mentioned below:

  1. for BrowserStack Live
  2. Select the desired Device-Browser combination to examine your website on.
  3. Testing Add to Cart and Remove from Cart functionalities of bstackdemo.com on different Device-Browser-OS combinations by manually following the test stairs mentioned in the beginning.
  4. To switch to a different browser on the same device or to switch the device, select “ Switch browser ” option from the remaining toolbar and then Select the desired Device-Browser-OS combination from the options available in the dashboard.
  5. Once the device and browser combination are selected, perform the execution steps observe above in different devices and browser combination to achieve crisscross browser along with cross device testing.
  6. To shift to a different browser on the like device or to shift the device choose the “ Switch browser ” option from the left toolbar. Comprehensive set of device and browser would be display again.

Expand the toolbar to the left to see option such as zoom, disk session, rotate device, change location, DevTools, image, and File injection. This facilitates the tester to run the test suit under.

For example, the habitation page for a web application seems fine in portrait mode. However, in landscape style it seems stretched. This variety of scenario can be tested with BrowserStack real devices hosted on a web cloud by choosing the rotate device option.The above steps, which are performed manually, can be automated habituate BrowserStack ’ s Automate Platform.

Google Pixel 7 Pro with OS edition 13 and Chrome browseriPhone 13 with OS version 15.4 and Safari browserBrowserStack Automate Platform

To perform Automated Cross Device Testing using postdate the below steps:

1. Navigate to BrowserStack ’ s homepage and fromProfile & gt; & gt; Summary pagefetch the username and access key.

2. Navigate to foliate to choose from a comprehensive set of options. Capabilities are a series of key-value pairs that allow you to configure your Selenium tests on the BrowserStack. The potentiality generator lets you select from a comprehensive set of options you can use to customize your examination on the BrowserStack Cloud Selenium Grid

3. In the below example, Android Samsung Galaxy S22 with OS version 12 and Chrome browser is selected.

4. In any java editor, create a Maven project and add Selenium Java, and TestNG dependencies.

& lt; dependencies & gt; & lt; dependence & gt; & lt; groupId & gt; org.seleniumhq.selenium & lt; /groupId & gt; & lt; artifactId & gt; selenium-java & lt; /artifactId & gt; & lt; variation & gt; 4.5.0 & lt; /version & gt; & lt; /dependency & gt; & lt; dependency & gt; & lt; groupId & gt; org.testng & lt; /groupId & gt; & lt; artifactId & gt; testng & lt; /artifactId & gt; & lt; version & gt; 7.6.1 & lt; /version & gt; & lt; scope & gt; compile & lt; /scope & gt; & lt; /dependency & gt; & lt; /dependencies & gt;

Below codification snippingshowcases the Chrome browser testing on Samsung Galaxy S22 on the existent device cloud. Get the complete code fromthisrepository.

public class AndroidTestBS {public static String username = `` & lt; BrowserStack username & gt; ''; public motionless String accesskey = `` & lt; BrowserStack accesskey & gt; ''; public motionless final String URL = `` https: // '' + username + ``: '' + accesskey + `` @ hub-cloud.browserstack.com/wd/hub ''; WebDriver driver; String url = `` https: //www.bstackdemo.com/ ''; MutableCapabilities capabilities = new MutableCapabilities (); HashMap & lt; String, Object & gt; browserstackOptions = new HashMap & lt; String, Object & gt; (); @ BeforeTest public void frame-up () throws MalformedURLException, InterruptedException {browserstackOptions.put (`` browserName '', `` chrome ''); browserstackOptions.put (`` deviceName '', `` Samsung Galaxy S22 ''); browserstackOptions.put (`` realMobile '', `` true ''); browserstackOptions.put (`` osVersion '', `` 12 ''); capabilities.setCapability (`` bstack: option '', browserstackOptions); driver = new RemoteWebDriver (new URL (URL), capability); driver.get (url); Thread.sleep (3000);} @ Test (priority = 1) public void verifyAddToCart () {List & lt; WebElement & gt; addToCart = driver.findElements (By.cssSelector (`` div.shelf-item__buy-btn '')); //Click on first item addToCart.get (0) .click (); WebElement itemDetails = driver.findElement (By.cssSelector (`` div.shelf-item__details '')); Assert.assertTrue (itemDetails.isDisplayed ());} @ Test (priority = 2) public void verifyRemoveFromCart () throws InterruptedException {WebElement del = driver.findElement (By.cssSelector (`` div.shelf-item__del '')); //Click on crisscross image to remove from cart del.click (); List & lt; WebElement & gt; itemDetails = driver.findElements (By.cssSelector (`` div.shelf-item__details '')); Assert.assertEquals (itemDetails.size (), 0);} @ AfterTest public void tearDown () {driver.quit ();}}

5. After running the above program, you can control the result on the Automate Dashboard page.

You besides get to see the performance picture. You can have access to text, network, and other logs. And it captures Appium logs too!

  • To automate the same tryout on any early device-browser combination, choose the desired set from the Capabilities Generator page and update the capabilities in the Java codification and execute the broadcast from the editor once again.
  • Refresh the Automate dashboard page to see the test results for the new device-model combination.

Talk to an Expert

Why use BrowserStack Live for Cross Device Testing?

is utilise for Cross Device Testing as it offers you to test on existent device and browsers. Here are some of the core features that make BrowserStack Live ideal for Cross Device Testing:

  • Test on 3500+ existent devices: BrowserStack gives a comprehensive device reportage by providing admittance to 3500+ real devices and browsers. Choose the craved browser-device combination and start testing.
  • Test under existent world conditions: You can test in like slow network,, using BrowserStack. It helps you experience your website just like how a exploiter execute.
  • Test on different screensizes: BrowserStack helps you experience how your website appear on device of different blind sizing and resolutions.
  • Debug in real time: BrowserStack Live gives you access to DevTools so that you can debug in real time for a faster and effective debugging.

Conclusion

may give false positive, and it is also time-consuming as one must download device-specific emulators/simulators to work on. On that account, is more true as it gives accurate upshot. The above manifestation proves that BrowserStack is the platform to run your tests on existent devices with zero overhead of gimmick setup. Smooth swap between browsers and devices makes it the best choice for testers/developers.

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