Introduction
In today's society, nearly everyone owns a smartphone, and these devices require many mobile applications to provide various services. As smartphones have become the primary means of how we interact with the world, organizations are increasingly considering the necessity to develop their own mobile applications to engage with their consumers.
Designers and app developers put in a lot of effort to produce appealing mobile applications that function properly across the various mobile phones used by the company's many customers. But no matter how experienced a developer is, and no matter how careful they are, errors are going to crop up during the application development process.
And so we come to the main topic of this article: mobile testing. Applications, like all other products, must be tested to guarantee that they are of high quality before they reach potential customers.
What is Mobile Testing?
Mobile testing or mobile application testing is the process of evaluating mobile applications for usability, functionality, and consistency errors. Mobile testing is critical since app users are quick to uninstall apps that crash, take too long to launch, freeze, or provide a bad user experience in some other way.
Effective testing is essential for minimizing errors, improving quality, and ensuring ease of use and performance in mobile apps.
Types of Mobile Testing
Given below are the main types of mobile testing:
Installation testing entails validating the program by installing and removing it on various devices.
Compatibility testing includes evaluating the application on various mobile devices, browsers, screen sizes, and OS versions in accordance with the specifications.
Usability testing entails ensuring that the mobile application is simple to use and offers a good user experience to consumers, resulting in constant user engagement and excellent user ratings.
Performance testing involves testing the application's performance to verify that it responds correctly in situations such as when the device is shut down, put in airplane mode, moving from 2G to 3G connectivity, and connecting to another device through WiFi, USB, or Bluetooth.
Operational testing includes checking backups and recovery plans to see whether the battery fails or data gets lost when the application is upgraded from a store.
Real environment condition testing entails examining the app's behavior when calls or messages come in as interruptions, under various network circumstances, and so on.
Types of Mobile Apps
Applications can be of different types:
Mobile applications are classified into three kinds. Your mobile testing strategy may change depending on the sort of application you're creating.
Native applications are programs that are designed for a specific platform. iOS, Android, Windows 10 Mobile, Tizen, and BlackBerry all have their own native apps that are built into their phones and designed specifically for those phones.
Mobile web applications are online pages that may be accessed using a mobile browser. Mobile native browsers, such as Chrome, Safari, or Firefox, are used to access web applications.
Hybrid applications are a combination of mobile web and native applications.
Challenges in Mobile Application Testing
1. Device variety
The large range of mobile devices available, including tablets, e-readers, mobile phones, and wearables, all with varied input modalities such as real keyboards, virtual keyboards, and so on, is one of the most difficult issues in mobile application testing. Mobile devices come in a variety of screen sizes and resolutions, and they may be used in either landscape or portrait mode.
This means that a feature that is operating well on one device may develop an issue when tested on a different device with a larger or smaller size or when rotated into a different screen orientation. So, testers need to test their apps on various mobile devices in various ways.
2. OS variety
Mobile devices use a variety of operating systems and multiple versions of the same operating system. Different operating systems, such as iOS, Android, and Windows, and the different versions of the operating systems, such as iOS 4.X, iOS 5.X, BB 4.X, 5.X, and 6.X, may have compatibility difficulties, posing a challenge for testers. Device testing plays an important role here.
3. Different Mobile App Types
A mobile app might be native, web-based, or hybrid. Each of these app types requires unique testing due to the differences in their implementation. Native and hybrid programs must be tested to ensure proper execution, download, platform interaction, and update functionalities. Web-only apps need to be tested only on different browsers and different versions of them. Other mobile testing problems, however, apply to all sorts of apps.
4. Connectivity
Other factors to consider for mobile testing include Bluetooth, WiFi, or mobile network connectivity. Applications that require the internet to function must be able to respond well to different connection speeds like Edge, 3G, or LTE.
An application's reaction to the loss of connectivity is also relevant for testing. For example: how does the application respond when a user puts their device on airplane mode or travels into an area without cell coverage?
Mobile Application Testing Strategy
Your testing strategy should meet all the following quality and performance guidelines.
1. Device selection
Analyze the market and select the devices that are commonly used. To determine which phones to incorporate into your testing phase, the client or app developers need to examine the popularity of specific devices as well as the marketing goals of the application.
2. Emulators
These are particularly important in the early phases of development since they enable rapid and efficient testing of the program. An emulator is a technology that transfers software from one environment to another without modifying the software itself. It mirrors the features and operates on the actual system.
3. Cloud-based testing of the mobile application
Cloud-based testing, which allows mobile devices to run on many platforms and networks, aids in overcoming the limitations of simulators and actual devices. You can use various cloud-based mobile testing apps like AWS Device Farm, Perfecto, and IBM Mobile Cloud.
Conclusion
Mobile applications are everywhere these days, and nearly every application has plenty of competitors. As a result, the role of the mobile app tester is more vital than ever. Mobile app testing is the process of testing a mobile app across a variety of use-cases to ensure that it is suitable for everyone, consistent, and of high quality.
Cover Photo by JuniperPhoton on Unsplash