Technology has spoiled us. Nowadays, consumers have no patience for apps that crash or get stuck. One bad customer experience and word about the poor performance of your mobile app will spread faster than the plague. Thanks to social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, today the word-of-mouth travels in a matter of seconds and reaches hundreds to millions of users worldwide. Now imagine investing thousands of dollars in your mobile app and receiving hateful negative reviews just because of a testing error.
How would you feel?
That, my dear friend, is the significance of mobile app testing. Therefore, it is critical to ensure that your mobile app provides a seamless user experience. But how does one ensure that? If you’ve never built a mobile app before, then you should know that mobile app testing plays an important role in mobile app development.
In this article, we will understand what mobile app testing is and discuss the best mobile app testing techniques and tools to ensure your mobile app provides a seamless user experience.
What is Mobile App Testing?
Technically, mobile app testing basically involves a number of processes to check a mobile app’s quality, functionality, usability, compatibility, and performance.But if those sophisticated words confuse you, then here’s the simple explanation: “Mobile app testing helps to ensure that a mobile app works seamlessly across all target devices and provides an intuitive user experience.” Having said that, you must also be curious about knowing – what is the best mobile app testing technique? The truth is, there is no “one-technique-fits-all” that works for all types of mobile apps. Depending on the type of mobile app you’re developing, you can one of the following mobile app testing techniques.
Mobile App Testing Techniques
Now that you know the significance of mobile app testing, let’s see how many mobile app testing techniques are available for you to choose from.
1 – Functional Testing
Functional testing basically helps in checking all the technical requirements of your mobile app. In simple terms, this mobile app testing technique basically helps to check if various functionalities of your mobile app are performing as anticipated or not. Typically, after conducting the test, the actual and expected outcomes are compared and based on the final report the efficiency of an app is determined.
2 – Performance Testing
This testing technique is used to verify the performance of a mobile app in different scenarios. For instance, this mobile app testing technique helps to check how a particular mobile app performs in low battery situation or how it responds to network changes from 4G to 3G or sometimes 2G. In simple terms, this testing technique helps to ascertain the speed, scalability, and stability of a mobile app.
3 – Interrupt Testing
Interrupt testing is very critical for most mobile apps as it helps to check how the mobile app reacts to sudden interruptions such as an incoming phone call, text message, plugged in & plugged out from charging, Alarm, Network connection lost, low battery, and device turn off.
4 – Installation Testing
The installation testing technique helps to test the behavior of a mobile app when it’s being downloaded and installed. As you might already know that your smartphone runs on an OS, this mobile app testing technique will help you make sure that your mobile app will blend with the mobile OS rightly to provide a seamless experience.
5 – Compatability Testing
Compatibility testing technique basically helps to ensure that a mobile app works on different hardware, operating system, network environments, etc. smoothly and provides a flawless experience. Simply put, this mobile app testing techniques checks a mobile app’s ability to run smoothly on a wide range of different devices of the same platform (Android or iOS).
6 – UI Testing
The UI of a mobile app plays a huge role in its success. The more comfort the users feel in using your mobile app, the higher the chances of your mobile app to succeed.
However, the factors of UI testing differ according to a mobile app’s category. For example, mobile games require an excellent UI to capture a large market, while business apps do not need that level of UI to capture the market.
Generally, UI testing checks the following aspects of a mobile app:
- Colors & Theme of mobile app
- Icons
- Buttons
- Images
- Nature of touch (single or multi-touch)
7 – Security Testing
Privacy, today, is users’ topmost concern and therefore it’s necessary to conduct various security testing of a mobile app. Typically, the security testing technique involves threat analysis, app permissions, and vulnerability analysis to provide the highest security possible to users’ private data and information. Now, we have not listed all of the mobile testing techniques for obvious reasons. But the above mobile app testing techniques into account are sufficient to ensure that your mobile app is error-free. That being said, let’s move further and see the most popular mobile app testing tools to perform all of the above techniques.
Mobile App Testing Tools
Mobile app testing tools are equally important to mobile app testing techniques. Below we’ve mentioned the most popular mobile app testing tools which are highly reliable and extremely effective.
1 – Monkeyrunner Tool
Monkeyrunner tool is only for Android app testing and it is designed to test an application at the functional level. The tool provides an API to control an emulator or an Android device outside the Android code.This tool can help you conduct functional testing and facilitates regressive test with an option for automation.
2 – Calabash
Calabash tool basically helps you write custom tests and supports both Android and iOS apps. It is an open-source testing framework that is designed to improve the quality of a mobile app, reduce costs, and increase throughput productivity.
3 – Kobiton
Kobiton is a cloud-based mobile app testing platform that serves both Android and iOS mobile app testing.This mobile app testing tool offers access to over 350 real Android and iOS devices and helps you in testing all swipes, gestures, taps, etc.
Conclusion
After reading the entire article, you now know about the mobile app testing process, how complex it can be, and what are the tools and techniques available. But, just knowing this information is not enough to perform mobile app testing on your own. Therefore, it’s wise to find a company that provides mobile app testing services to thoroughly test your mobile app before publishing it on the App Store.
Author – Bio
Shahid Mansuri
Shahid Mansuri Co-founded Peerbits, one of the leading mobile app development company USA, in 2011 which provides Blockchain app development services. His visionary leadership and flamboyant management style have yield fruitful results for the company. He believes in sharing his strong knowledge base with learned concentration on entrepreneurship and business
