Applause Reviews

We use the crowdtesting solution predominantly. It has helped us get a predefined audience of testers from specific geographies that we target. They give us a set of 40 to 50 testers, and we're able to send our builds to them to test and provide reports. These testers highlight any bugs. We are able to send them a questionnaire about specific things we want to test and get some feedback about whether they were able to understand the feature and use it effectively.

The most valuable feature is the capacity to define an audience. I am able to define specific devices and ask for testers that have these devices. Through Applause, we're able to get a large set of real device coverage for our testing. 
For example, there are multiple compliance checks that we need to do for specific states in India as our product is unregulated or not allowed. In those cases, we're able to test that the product is actually not accessible from there. We are able to test localization transmigration in different geographies. 

The second valuable feature is turnaround time. Prior to using Applause, it would take us a considerable amount of time to fix bugs found in new releases and to send out new release versions. UsingApplause, we get regress testing over the weekends and by Monday morning, we have our bug list ready. We're able to prioritize a few set of bugs that we think are critical and solve them over the first half of Monday before sending out a new build. The actual time has been reduced by over 75%. It used to take three weeks to be able to really ramp up a build, and now we're able to do it in less than a week.

I would like to see improvements on the quality of the UX/UI side and for the use of the solution to be more intuitive. 

We have been using this solution for 11 months. 

We have not experienced any issues with stability. 

A customer success team was onboarded onto a shared Slack channel and they were super responsive. The whole adoption and customer support cycle is great.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. Firstly, you need to integrate your bug reporting system with the solution. Then you want to be able to define the right set of audiences and your test cycles. Once your audiences are defined, the setup is complete.

Applause is an inexpensive tool based on the value and service they give you. 

The licensing for this solution is annual. 

Applause is a very flexible tool. What they're giving you is a crowd of users who are incentivized to use your app and find issues with it and this is very powerful. I would others to be clear about their use use of the solution. You want to be clear on why you are using it, or how would you want to consume and leverage it. Drawing value comes down to the client and  how they want design their cycles. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten and that's predominantly because of their customer support. They take it upon themselves to make sure that over the first three months of adoption that the client is getting value from the solution. Their responsiveness has always been above par. Because we had them on Slack, they're always available and we have one monthly review call.

It is used for testing. Applause is essentially a service. It is on the bedrock of a SaaS platform, and it doesn't have a version.

If I'm in India and I want to launch my product in the US, I can ask them to test it in the US. They will be able to do it for me in three days. Hundreds of testers in the US can test my product and give me live feedback on how it is performing on their apps, on their mobile phones, and on their laptops, which is a very strong win for me.

Multiple teams get the benefits of Applause. The development team is obviously able to develop much faster by using Applause because they get the bugs in real-time, and they can work on those bugs. It really works as a very strong Bible or a cheat sheet for them. If they're developing over the week from Monday to Friday, we give the builds to Applause on Friday evening. On Saturday and Sunday, their teams do the testing, and on Monday, when the developers are back, they can see the bugs, and they know which bugs they need to rectify, which is great for us.

Applause is uberizing the concept of testing. Companies generally have internal testing teams with, for example, 20 or 30 testers. With Applause, you don't need to hire testers anymore. Applause can do the testing for you. They've got a community of testers across the globe. There are 150,000 testers in India, and 1.5 million across the globe to do the testing for you.

The beauty of this solution is that they can do the in-the-wild testing. They can test at any location with any device and with any category of people, which helps companies understand what their real user experience is.

Applause seamlessly does functional testing for me. It can do exploratory testing for me. It can also do a lot of payment testing and UI/UX testing, which I feel is invaluable because, with the limited bandwidth that I have internally in my team, I can't do a lot. This is where I can use Applause to make sure that I'm testing very stringently before going live.

The kind of people they have in the community are very good. The results are top-notch. The turnaround time is very fast, and there are no issues with respect to the legality. It is very secure and very stable.

Pricing is the main thing where I feel Applause can do a lot better. They can improve on their pricing. They can cover more with more startup-friendly packages.

Another thing that they can improve is how they work with teams on the payment side. They can do payment testing, but they can't do trading. If you are a stock exchange app, you can't do trading. Obviously, there are limitations related to GDPR, etc, but that is one thing for which they can find solutions. I'd like to see how effectively they can do trading on the app, which is something they are not covering right now. So, the testers currently can't do trading. If you're buying stock and your app allows you to buy Microsoft and Google shares, that is something that is currently not in the testing purview. So, that is something that I would like them to include.

They can plug in a little bit of automation to help companies automate their testing as well. This is another area where I feel Applause can be better. They can do more on the automation front. 

I would also love to see how they can do omnichannel testing. They do some omnichannel testing, but it is not their strongest area. This is an area that needs to be strengthened.

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

It is very stable. 

It is very scalable. In terms of people working with this solution, the development team, the product teams, the growth teams, and the user experience teams are using Applause to ramp up their production and build their side of their business. So, more than 300 to 400 people benefit from Applause.

It's a fully-managed solution. We are always in touch with one person who is the community head. That person is our single point of contact. From a technical point of view, no one is required because the service is not very technical. It's more about getting the right community in place, and the community manager that we have is our single point of contact. This community manager takes care of everything for us. 

There is no deployment for Applause. Basically, you share a build with Applause. It's a version of your app that you share with Applause, and they get it tested by hundreds of testers they have in their community. So, there's no deployment. 

It's seamless. It's plug-and-play. If you give Applause a build on Friday, they will send it to the community on Saturday, and by Monday, they will finish the whole testing, and you will have all the bugs that they have been able to find during the testing. You can then work on those bugs and make sure that your real customers don't face those bugs.

We have absolutely seen an ROI. It helps in taking the Play Store ratings up. It also helps in retaining customers and being able to acquire more customers. With a better app experience, through word of mouth, we are able to acquire more customers.

It has improved our developer productivity. Our developers are no longer stuck with finding out issues themselves because Applause is able to do it for them. Because they already know what the issues are in their development, they're able to resolve them very quickly. So, overall, the productivity has gone massively up, and the ROI is from multiple fronts.

It has a yearly subscription. It is an expensive proposition, and Applause can do a lot better in terms of pricing.

If you're using Applause for the first time, make sure that you first do a PoC for a month. During the PoC, you set an agenda about what are the key things that you want to test and also understand and redefine what success means to you. You should also communicate that to the Applause team. 

When you're looking at Applause, look at it as a long-term solution, not as a short-term solution. That's because once you have Applause in your team, you won't require a very large QA team. You can be fairly confident that your releases are stable. Applause is something that helps you in making your release, your product, and your app stable. So, you need to look at it as a long-term partnership, not as a short-term project.

I would rate Applause a nine out of ten because it is very scalable. They are very community-centered, and the community and the project management team are absolutely superior in their skillset. They are very good to work with.