About
We started TestApps because we kept shipping the same bug
Not literally the same one — but the same kind. The one that only appeared on a device nobody on the team owned, in a flow nobody had walked through end to end since March.
In 2021 we were the engineering team at a retail app with about 400,000 monthly users. We had tests. We had a QA contractor two days a week. We still shipped a release where the basket emptied itself on older Android handsets, and we only found out because a customer tweeted a video of it.
The problem wasn't that we didn't care. It was that testing lived in four disconnected places: a CI runner that only knew about unit tests, a device lab of three phones in a drawer, a spreadsheet of manual steps, and a contractor's inbox. Nobody could answer "is this build safe?" without asking four people.
TestApps is the tool we wanted then: automation, real hardware and human testers reporting into one timeline, per build.
We're now a team of nineteen in Leeds and remotely across Europe — engineers who build the grid, and career testers who run the manual cycles. We test our own product on it, which is a better quality guarantee than anything we could put in a brochure.
How we work
Four things we're stubborn about
A failing test must be believable
A suite people have learned to ignore is worse than no suite. We re-run, score and quarantine flaky tests aggressively, because trust in the red build is the whole product.
Real hardware, or say so plainly
Emulators have their place and we use them for speed. But when we say a test ran on a Galaxy A14, a physical Galaxy A14 in Frankfurt ran it.
Testers are colleagues, not a queue
Our manual testers are salaried, trained and assigned to the same accounts each cycle. They learn your product, so the second report is sharper than the first.
Accessibility isn't a separate audit
Contrast, focus order, labels and text scaling are checked on every run, not once a year before a compliance deadline.
The people you'll deal with
Hannah Ainsley
Co‑founder & CEO
Ran the retail app that started all this. Talks to every new customer personally.
Rahul Prasad
Co‑founder & CTO
Built the device grid. Still the person who gets paged when a rack misbehaves.
Joanna Brett
Head of QA Services
Fifteen years testing banking and health apps. Writes the manual test plans.
Tomas Öberg
Head of Customer Engineering
Gets your first suite running, usually on the onboarding call itself.
How we got here
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2021
The basket bug
Two of us start building a device grid at evenings and weekends, mostly out of frustration.
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2022
First twelve customers
A rack of 40 phones in a Leeds office and a very manual onboarding process.
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2024
Managed manual QA launches
Customers kept asking for people as well as machines, so we hired testers properly.
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2026
Three regions, 4,200 combinations
London, Frankfurt and Virginia, running around 90,000 test sessions a week.
Come and break something
Preferably in staging, on our devices, before your users get the chance.