Multi-Platform Mobile Environment Emulator: Ripple

Today when you go out to shop a mobile phone, the buying criteria is not the price, plan, looks or camera capabilities only; buyers now consider operating system as a strong deciding factor as it actually reflects the power and ‘future-compatibility’ of the device. Some prefer Android, some like Windows and some are die-hard fan of iOS.

This rapid spread of multiple competing operating systems in the market throws a serious challenge for the developers of mobile apps. The challenge is to provide application with support for multiple platforms. There are a number of tools and techniques for developing cross-platform compatible mobile applications that we would be sharing on this website.

Today, we are featuring Ripple, a multi-platform mobile environment emulator that runs in a web browser and is custom-tailored to HTML5 mobile application testing.

Ripple provides you a single interface that you can use to test your mobile applications for multiple platforms.

It offers the ability to look under the hood of your mobile applications, gaining full visibility into what is it doing. It also allows for the use of existing tools to perform JavaScript debugging, HTML DOM inspection, automated testing, as well as multiple device and screen resolution emulation in real-time without having to redeploy the mobile application or restart the emulator.

Ripple is provided as a a Chrome extension. It runs into your Chrome browser and uses back-end services to perform some of the more complex operations.