Mobile app testing challenges & a guide to overcome them

In this digital age, one thing that we all consider as an essential part of our daily life is mobile apps. They have made an unbeatable space and changed a lot of things that we expected. With the constant increase in the usage of mobile apps, there is a serious need for proper app testing.

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One of the main reasons for this need is to serve app users with a better user experience and performance that they are looking for. However, mobile app testing is more complex when it compared to desktop or web applications. Today, app testers have to face various challenges while testing the app.

What is Mobile App Testing?

Today, mobile app testing plays a very important role to ensure long-term success. And, it is must to test an app over different platforms, operating systems and networking before launching worldwide.

It is one such process by which developed app for handheld devices is tested for its features, usability, functionality, and consistency. Generally, mobile app testing can be automated or manual and companies prefer it as per their app’s requirements.

Major Challenges of Mobile App Testing

Comprehend Target Users’ Requirements

Do you know that the user experience is a highly important thing to mobile app’s success? As you need different experts and professionals to develop an application, including developers, designers and analysts.

No doubt every member related to app development does their work exceptionally and ultimately it is on the tester to evaluate the mobile application. A mobile app tester needs to go through every single aspect and check entire application carefully.

One of the major challenges most of the app testers face is to comprehend target users, market, and the competitors. It is a job of the tester to test, keeping all these together with brand’s value. A smallest of bug and mistake can make your app performs poorly, resulting in a bad user experience. It can be eliminated by a proper communication between the team and people, who analyze user's’ requirements.

OS Destruction

It is one of the major challenges that faced by all the app testers and this challenge mainly arises because of different versions of OSs. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have approximately 10+ different versions obtainable in the market; therefore, developers need to ensure that their developed app runs on all different versions of operating systems.

No matter whether it is Android, iOS or any other OS, an app tester needs to make sure that the app works equivalently in all the versions. There must be seamless user experience irrespective of the OS installed in the device.

Automation

Automation testing is considered as a vital part of mobile app testing, whereas, there are enormous tools obtainable in the market to serve the same purpose. And, it is a tester’s job to understand that which tool will help him to perform his work and execute the entire process.

However, this decision will be also based on the operating system the app relates to. And it also matters that whether the tool is free or paid. But there are various tools that do not give accurate results and information about the app, so such tools can give birth to various challenges.

Different Connection Types

It can be another challenge for the QA team to test all the different connections obtainable to modern mobile devices. Generally, the different mobile data connection types are 2G, 3G, and 4G, each incrementally gives increase to speed and better transmission technology.

And it is expected that 90% of the world’s population will be using at least 2G coverage by the end of 2017. So, the varying speeds and connection qualities across these generations will make testing a quite difficult and challenging.

For such reasons, it is essential that testing accounts for the different range of speeds and qualities of connectivity that the app may experience. In addition to this, app testing should also recognize and measure the bandwidth usage of the app as there are many service providers’ plans that do not offer an unlimited data usage.

Testing based on Different Devices

It is another major challenge that faced by app testers as they need to check the app’s performance on different devices. As they need a testing laboratory set up with mobile devices.

It would be quite expensive than the emulation method as it confirms device based functions and other essential QoS parameters. For the fruitful execution, it mainly depends upon the swift changes in the mobile devices and the platforms.

How to Overcome These Challenges?

To build a better user experience, it is essential that app tester has a proper communication with the research team to comprehend the users’ requirements and test accordingly.

Moreover, it would be also good to analyze users’ preference for devices and OS so that testers only need to test the app in audience’s preferred devices and OS. This way, a lot of time and efforts can be saved.

If you are finding it challenging to test application through an automation process, you can consider a right mobile device testing strategy and understand when to automate and when to prefer manual testing.

As some of the manual tests like configuration tests, performance test, and usability tests are less expensive, smooth, and simply faster. There are various mobile app development companies that still follow manual app testing instead of automatic testing and successfully delivering bug-free and feature-rich apps.

Conclusion

So, these are some of the mobile app testing challenges that app testers are facing; but it is also possible to overcome these challenges and make mobile app testing effortless. While testing your app, you can consider above-mentioned things in mind and make your app bug-free.