Mobile internet usage continues to grow while desktop and laptop usage is declining. This pattern has remained consistent for years. As more people spend significant time on mobile devices, delivering a smooth experience in mobile apps has become essential.
If mobile apps are not tested, it is impossible to know if they meet user expectations. Poor performance or unresolved issues often result in one-star reviews and negative feedback online. Testing mobile apps helps maintain a reliable experience regardless of the app type or platform. This article explains key testing strategies to ensure mobile apps are reliable and perform well.
Table of Contents
What Is Mobile Testing?
Mobile testing involves assessing the usability, performance, functionality, and security of a mobile app to ensure it meets quality standards. This process ensures the app delivers a high level of convenience and functionality for users. It comprises testing devices, operating systems, screens of different sizes, network conditions, and factors, among others, to eliminate errors, bugs, or issues in the application before its release to the users.
Why Is Mobile Testing Important for Your App?
Here are the reasons why mobile testing is essential to test your mobile apps:
- Ensuring Quality: Mobile app testing is very essential since it helps to meet quality expectations and locate errors by correcting flaws, failures, and problems before releasing an app to the customers. This helps prevent the user experience with crashes, freezes, or errors that may result in low ratings, bad reviews, and unsatisfied users.
- Enhancing User Experience: Testing is the key to ensuring the app’s UI is simple and easily accessible and creates a highly rated user experience. Developers can detect performance bottlenecks and usability issues, among other things, and may frontline them early in the development process. This will help them make necessary improvements to the user experience and increase user retention and engagement.
- Optimizing Performance: Performance testing draws attention to performance-related problems like sluggish response, long loading times, or high battery consumption and improves the app’s performance again. This guarantees real-time and in-context accuracy and reliability, allowing us to adapt to different devices, network conditions, and user cases.
- Maximizing Compatibility: Compatibility testing carries out testing to ensure that the app functions on different devices and among different operating systems, screen sizes, and resolutions. By running for devices and configurations under other circumstances, developers can create an app with a stable user experience and bring this to as many users as possible.
- Enhancing Security: Security testing makes it possible to find security gaps that may harm the program and its users by running attacks from hackers and malicious people who want to harm the program. Developing a security system for an app at a later stage might not be effective in entirely preventing potential risks, and user data may be vulnerable.
- Minimizing Risks: Testing first eliminates the risks associated with releasing the mobile application to the market, such as user dissatisfaction, resistance to change, and brand isolation. Extensive testing is crucial because developers can spot and eliminate risks before app release. Hence, it leads to a successful product that will withstand long-term competition.
- Saves Cost: It is significant to find and address problems as early as possible in development and conduct testing to avoid expensive reworking, delay, and damage to the brand’s reputation. By conducting testing up front, which increases the chances of preventing hidden issues, companies can save the costs they would have faced in the long run and sustain growth and future success in the market.
Popular Approaches to Mobile Testing
There are two popular approaches to test mobile applications. These are manual testing and automated testing. As mobile apps become more complex, it has become difficult to rely only on manual testing. In manual testing, a QA specialist runs tests from start to finish without using automation tools, extensions, or scripts. This process takes a lot of time and effort. This is where automated testing helps.
In automated testing, the QA specialist uses mobile testing tools, writes test scripts, runs them, and collects the results. Automated testing is mainly used for testing features that require handling a large number of tests at the same time with a huge amount of data. However, this method limits the developer to certain tools. Because of this, manual and automated testing are often used together to ensure better results.
Types of Mobile Apps
Based on technology, there are three types of mobile apps:
Web Apps
These are web-based apps that users access through mobile browsers. They can either be a mobile-friendly version of a website or a progressive web app (PWA), which provides additional features for a better mobile experience.
Advantages:
- Easy access and distribution without app store installations.
- Lower development costs.
- Scalability to accommodate increasing user bases.
- Reduced storage requirements on user devices.
Disadvantages:
- Limited access to device features (camera, GPS, etc.).
- Security concerns and vulnerability to web-based threats.
- Potential browser compatibility issues.
Native Apps
These are built for platforms like Android or iOS and are downloaded from app stores like Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store. This category includes apps built using Java/Kotlin for Android or Objective-C/Swift for iOS, as well as cross-platform apps using frameworks like ReactNative, Flutter, and NativeScript.
Advantages:
- Optimized performance and speed.
- Superior user experience adhering to platform-specific design guidelines.
- Direct access to device features (camera, GPS, accelerometer, etc.).
Disadvantages:
- Higher development costs for multiple platforms.
- Longer development time.
- Complex maintenance and updates for each platform.
- Platform dependency, limiting reach across different operating systems.
- Requires platform-specific developer skill sets.
Hybrid Apps
Of all the various types of mobile apps, a hybrid app stands out as a fusion of both native and web apps. It is crafted as a web app within a native app container. By harnessing specific native platform features and device hardware, hybrid apps deliver the advantages of a native user experience while adapting to non-native environments.
Advantages:
- Access to device features through the native container.
- Ease of updates without app store deployment.
- Wider audiences reach across multiple platforms.
Disadvantages:
- Performance limitations compared to fully native apps.
- User experience compromises compared to native apps.
- Complexity in accessing device features.
What Are the Challenges in Mobile Testing?
Let’s explore the primary challenges mobile app testers encounter:
- Device Fragmentation: One of the major challenges in mobile testing is device fragmentation. With a vast range of devices available, each with different operating systems and screen sizes, ensuring compatibility across all devices is difficult. Testers must ensure the app works smoothly on various combinations of devices and operating system versions, which can take a lot of time and increase costs.
- User Experience: The performance of a mobile app is closely tied to its user experience. UX testing checks usability, accessibility, and user satisfaction to find issues that may affect the experience.
- Automation Challenges: Even though automation improves testing speed, it also creates challenges, especially in mobile application testing. Developing strong automated test scripts that cover different scenarios, adapt to app changes, and address mobile-specific challenges is difficult. Not all tests, particularly in mobile environments, can be automated, making it important to balance manual and automated testing for better coverage.
- Localization Testing: Apps reaching international markets need localization testing to confirm they fit different languages and cultural contexts. This involves testing the functionality of the application in various languages and making sure that content is correctly displayed and translated.
- Integration with Third-Party Services: Many mobile apps integrate with third-party services, such as payment gateways, social media platforms, and analytics tools. To integrate well with these services, the app must go through extensive testing to check its interaction with external systems.
- System compatibility: Different devices come with various hardware capabilities, such as cameras, sensors, and GPS. Compatibility testing with multiple hardware components is necessary to ensure a uniform experience for users.
Mobile Testing Strategies
After deciding on how to test your apps, a clear mobile testing strategy is needed to get the best results. Here are some steps to help test and release quality apps.
- Choosing the Right Devices: The first step in creating a good strategy is picking the right devices. Focus on the most popular devices among your target users to cover 70-80% of your testing needs, with the option to test others later.
- Early Testing and Communication: Testing early in development helps catch problems before they grow, saving time and costs. It gives continuous feedback so teams can quickly adjust and maintain quality standards. Early testing leads to smoother project flow, meeting deadlines, and better user experience.
- Automated Mobile Testing: Automation plays a key role in mobile testing. It helps speed up bug detection by running tests on multiple browsers simultaneously. This increases accuracy and efficiency and reduces testing time.
- Mobile Performance and Load Testing: Testing how web apps perform after development is important. It’s also crucial to check how they behave on mobile browsers. Using cloud-based testing lets you simulate real user behavior. It tracks response time and latency and tests various scenarios. Mobile performance and load testing help ensure your app works well on all mobile browsers and devices.
- Functionality Testing: In functionality testing, testers assess whether the core functions are working as expected. For example, when testing an e-commerce application, essential features like login, registration, payment gateway integration, CTA clickability, and cart additions need to be tested.
Benefits of Functional Testing in Mobile Browser Testing:
- Improves user experience by fixing major issues.
- Prevents negative feedback and ensures all requirements are met.
- Builds a strong digital brand image.
- Confirms that core functions are working.
- UI and UX Optimization: A solid design strategy is crucial as it affects how users interact with the app. The design must adapt to the device’s size and reduce bandwidth usage, making load times faster. Elements should be in line with the device’s latest updates. The UI should be simple, with easy navigation for all users and only necessary elements. This helps users explore the app easily.
- Localization Testing: Sometimes, language adjustments are needed for different regions. Checkout pages should support multiple currencies. Also, your brand’s message may need to change based on local laws. Localization testing is important more than ever.
Test for location-specific features like language, maps, and other metrics to improve user experience. For example, an e-commerce company should customize currency, language, and time based on the user’s location. Consider load times for these areas to optimize the experience. Geolocation testing tools help test different location-based scenarios, leading to a better, more personalized experience for users and higher conversions.
- Cross-Platform Testing: Since users access apps on various devices and OS versions, ensuring a consistent experience across platforms is essential. Cross-platform testing is critical, especially when done on real devices to check compatibility. Using a cloud-based platform like LambdaTest ensures cross-platform compatibility on real devices.
LambdaTest is an AI-based test execution platform that allows hassle-free mobile testing at scale with 3000+ browser-OS combinations and over 5000+ real environments. This platform gives real device cloud testing for cross-platform compatibility and allows teams to test mobile apps on all sorts of devices and OS versions.
Being a well-established platform for test automation frameworks, including but not limited to Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Espresso, and XCUITest, it is ideally suited for Appium-driven mobile test automation. With it, simply run your best manual or automated tests, while an Appium tutorial exists for those interested in starting with approachable test execution and strategy.
- Exploratory Testing: Exploratory testing allows testers to evaluate features without a set test plan, finding issues beyond regular testing. Skilled testers use their experience to uncover hidden problems, increasing test coverage by identifying unique issues. This flexible approach leads to a more thorough evaluation and supports an adaptive testing strategy.
Conclusion
In conclusion, mobile testing is very important to make sure apps work well, are easy to use, and perform smoothly on different devices and platforms. With the number of mobile users growing and the availability of many types of devices, businesses need a strong testing plan to deliver high-quality apps. This means understanding the challenges of using both real devices and virtual tools, balancing manual and automated testing, and picking the best testing tools. By following these best practices, companies can create apps that are reliable and user-friendly.
A good mobile testing strategy helps meet customer expectations and supports business success in a competitive market. Testing early using the right tools and involving real users through beta testing can catch issues before the app is released. This reduces risks and ensures a better experience for users. By focusing on quality and performance, businesses can make the most of the growing mobile app market and keep their customers happy.