1.1Introduction: Why This Chapter Matters

Before you write a single test, before you choose a single tool, before you provision a single cloud device -- you must understand the scale of what you are dealing with. Device fragmentation is the fundamental challenge that makes mobile testing different from desktop web testing, and understanding it is what separates a naive testing approach ("we test on every device") from a mature one ("we use analytics to build a tiered device matrix covering 90% of users with 12 devices").

This chapter gives you the numbers, the context, and the mental model you need to make informed testing decisions throughout the rest of this book.