I got into hybrid app development from web development a little bit too fast, and i'm now in the process of finishing my first mobile app done with Ionic/Cordova.
Though I struggle with it, badly. Not because of the code, but because of the lack of comfort to test the app with each new modification.
It's easy to test data, it's hard to test plugins and making sure everything's working on the device. When it comes to testing Cordova apps, I find myself during this beta testing doing 50% development, 50% testing. Not receiving a push notification? Bad luck! Try to figure out what went wrong in your code and build again, while pray for the best. Didn't work again? Haha!
This kind of development is energy consuming at the very least, each build takes about 15 mins (using intel XDK to build with crosswalk) until it gets installed in the device, and you have to make sure with each build that the code is perfect otherwise you (and the clients) are not happy.
I look at the back-end developer and I feel envious that he can just change a line of code and fully re-test it without spending so much time hoping for the best. So i'm sorry if this question became more like a rant, but what are the best practices involving testing hybrid apps?
I'm doing whatever I can so far to avoid building and making sure the code is perfectly ok first, and I have two development environments inside the code for testing and developing. I'm sure there are better practices than this, please let us hear them!
Thanks!