Now anyone can ship mobile apps faster with fewer bugs

Mobile testing is hard

Mobile app teams create amazing mobile experiences that influence our daily lives. But the way we test the quality of these apps is nowhere near the standards we set for ourselves or that our users have come to expect.

I started Waldo in 2018 after experiencing this first-hand for too long. I’d been an iOS engineer, designer, and product manager for 10 years, and I dreaded the feeling I got every time my team was about to ship a new version of an app. Sure, I was always excited about the new release, but deep down there was the worry of missing something — of letting a bad bug out into the wild. Testing was the bane of my existence. It created bottlenecks in the product development process, stress on the team, and delays in shipping our product.

The existing solutions were quite archaic. On the one hand, manual testing was tedious and prone to human error. On the other, scripted automation was flaky, hard to maintain, and couldn’t evolve with your app. Scripting took engineers away from working on cool features or required a fully dedicated eng team to fix and manage. This is quite expensive, especially for a lean team trying to do great things with limited resources.

So we built Waldo

Laurent, my friend and co-founder, and I knew there had to be a better way. So we embarked on a crazy journey to build the world’s first no-code testing platform. We designed Waldo to make it easy for anyone to create automated mobile tests, no coding skills required. Literally, anyone can do it!

Here’s how it works:

1. Record tests right in your browser: Upload your app file to Waldo and walk through it as you would on your phone. Waldo records every screen and the logic that connects them to learn how your app is structured.

2. Run your tests: Waldo reliably replays all recorded tests against every new version of your app, automatically. It’s very handy to test a new flow or make sure your new feature didn’t accidentally break something else in your app.

3. Fix issues: If a test fails, Waldo lets you know precisely where things went wrong so you can update the failed test or alert your team to fix the issue.

With Waldo, we want to help mobile teams build better apps and ship faster with fewer bugs. By catching any bugs early (before your users do), you also avoid turning a loyal user into a social media gremlin.

Running behind the scenes of some top-rated apps

We’ve quietly been working with some of the top-rated iOS apps for a while now, helping their teams validate builds before they ship. We’re saving our customers thousands of hours in testing time every week and have detected tens of thousands of bugs.

Here are just a few examples of the things we like to hear from our customers:

• Alltrails, one of my favorite apps to use when I go hiking, makes sure their app is working properly in 4 languages, no need to test every localization.
• Jumprope, which lets people create highly visual wiki-hows, currently has 96 tests on Waldo and has processed over 2000 builds, catching API bugs, UI problems, regressions, and crashes before shipping.
• KeepSafe, a leader in cloud data security, runs 600 tests with Waldo on a weekly basis. Turnaround time: 2 hours, or 30x faster than their previous testing process. That’s nice!
• The QA manager at Elevate, the mind-sharpening app, trusted our results enough to finally take a small vacation for the first time in years!

New funding and open sign-ups

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $6.5 million seed round led by Josh Kopelman and his fantastic team at First Round Capital. Our early investors at Matrix Partners also participated, as well as supportive angels who have all been founders of notable mobile apps themselves.

We’re even more excited to share that Waldo is now open for sign-ups. Want to give it a go? Sign up for a free version and we’re pretty sure you won’t look back. Not a single person has yet to tell us that they miss their old scripting days

Not quite ready to jump right in? Contact us and we’ll walk you through everything.

When it comes to building better apps, testing is just the tip of the iceberg. Right now, we’re focused on fixing what’s broken about mobile testing. But that’s just the cornerstone for a bigger plan to completely rethink how mobile experiences are created. We believe moving forward we can leverage data to impact product creation early in the process and help teams implement flows that convert and satisfy more. If you’re intrigued by what we’re up to and interested in joining the team, drop me a line.

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