# How Dropbox leverages testing to maintain high level of trust at scale

DevFeed: [How Dropbox leverages testing to maintain high level of trust at scale](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/how-dropbox-leverages-testing-to-maintain-high-level-of-trust-at-scale-22668.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://medium.com/androiddevelopers/how-dropbox-leverages-testing-to-maintain-high-level-of-trust-at-scale-b7b1bdf6161e?source=rss----95b274b437c2---4>)

Author: Jose Alcérreca

Published: 2025-04-23T17:26:09Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Android Developers - Medium](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/android-developers-medium.md>)

Topics: [dropbox](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/dropbox.md>), [Testing](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/testing.md>), [Android](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/android.md>), [test](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/test.md>), [engineering-culture](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/engineering-culture.md>)

Tags: [android](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/android.md>), [automated](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/automated.md>), [case-study](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/case-study.md>), [dropbox](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/dropbox.md>), [e2e-testing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/e2e-testing.md>), [engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/engineering.md>), [engineering-culture](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/engineering-culture.md>), [featured](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/featured.md>), [quality](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/quality.md>), [testing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/testing.md>)

## AI overview

This article describes how Dropbox evolved its Android testing strategies to maintain user trust and timely feedback at scale. It discusses the testing pyramid, automated and end-to-end testing, Android integration, and the costs of an early monolithic app structure.

## Source excerpt

This is part 2 of the Testing at scale series of articles where we asked industry experts to share their testing strategies. In this article, Ryan Harter, Staff Engineer at Dropbox, shares how the shape of Dropbox's testing pyramid changed over time, and what tools they use to get timely feedback. With more than one billion downloads, the Dropbox app for Android has to maintain a high quality bar for a diverse set of use cases and users. With less than 30 Android engineers, manual testing and #yolo isn't enough to maintain confidence in our codebase, so we employ a variety of different testing strategies to ensure we can continually serve our users needs. Since Dropbox makes it easy to access your files across all of your devices, the Android app has to support viewing as many of those files as possible, including media files, documents, photos, and all of the variations within these categories. Additionally, features like Camera Uploads, which automatically backs up all of your most important photos, require deep integration with the Android OS in ways that have changed significantly over the years and across Android versions. All of this needs to continually work for our users, without them having to worry about the complexity, because the last thing anyone wants is to worry that they might lose their data. While the size and distribution of the Android team at Dropbox has changed throughout the years, it's imperative that we're able to consistently build and refine features within the app while maintaining the level of trust from our users that we've become known for. To help underscore how Dropbox has been able to foster that trust, I'd like to share some ways that our testing strategies have changed over the years. How it started While automated testing has always been an important part of engineering culture at Dropbox, it hasn't always been easy on Android. Years ago Dropbox invested in testing infrastructure that leaned heavily on End-to-End (E2E) testing. B