5 Challenges & Tips When Testing Mobile Applications
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The number of mobile devices is only increasing. While consumers are happy with the number of new devices coming onto the market, app developers have their work cut out for them. They face—among other things—the challenge of testing their apps.
The first step in creating a successful app is understanding what makes a good one. Here are five challenges every engineer should keep in mind when developing a new mobile application.
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The top five mobile app testing challenges include:
Usability
It is a broad truth that the success of a mobile app is significantly dependent on a great user experience. So, how can we make sure that users’ experiences with our application are as smooth as possible for every user?
Mobile app design is about more than just visual appeal. It’s about ensuring your app works well and is accessible to a wide range of users. This can be particularly challenging when you’re also creating an app for a global audience.
Pro tip: To ensure that the app matches users’ experiences exactly, we must first understand how they will interact with it. That requires us to map out their behavior, and then use that information to guide the app’s development.
Also, it’s important to think through the design of your app and make sure you’ve considered all the visual elements such as the aesthetics, font size, color choices and overall design. That means ensuring it works functionally as well as from an accessibility standpoint.
OS and browser fragmentation
It is not enough for an app to just work. It needs to be fast as well. When it comes to testing mobile devices, the number two challenge is dealing with fragmentation—the fact that new operating systems and browsers are always being introduced.
On top of it, there are also older and legacy versions that need to be supported.
So, how can one ensure that their mobile apps are compatible with any version of browser and operating system? Testing your application through real OS and browsers is the only way to go.
But what if you don’t have access to hundreds of OS and browser combinations?
Pro tip: To test an app’s compatibility with different operating systems, one can employ emulators or simulators. Emulators mimic the functioning of a device or an OS on another device or OS. Simulators, on the other hand, create an environment that mimics the real world.
You need not create a live device lab to run these tests. You can achieve this by working with cloud-based app providers like Sauce Labs and Browser stack.
Collaborating with a cloud-based mobile application provider would make it easier to test on the most recent mobile devices and different operating systems and browser combinations and produce results in just a snap.
Performance
The third-most-important challenges that users discuss are issues of app performance and battery life.
Keeping an app available at all times while keeping the power usage at a minimum is often a challenge–and users want it to be done.
Users don’t differentiate between hardware and software when they talk about “apps.” So it is important for us, who do differentiate between them, to come together to provide our users with a seamless performance.
Pro tip: In order to ensure the performance of the app is good, it is important to ensure that we use the right kind of performance testing tools, and profilers.
We should also understand how we can measure the performance of our app from various perspectives (e.g., memory usage, CPU usage), so that we can ensure that they are all within acceptable limits.
Check how Zuci ensures seamless performance by measuring key metrics
User Experience
The number four challenge when we talk about mobile testing is again, how do we ensure that any kind of user experience is well built into it?
User experience is the key to your application’s success.
We discussed this earlier, but it’s worth mentioning again: User-experience involves much more than just different colors, sizes, fonts, and such. The first step in ensuring great UX is to understand the needs of the users, the marketplace, and the competition.
Pro tip: We need to provide navigation that matches how the user will naturally move through the app, as well as ensure that navigation is easy to find and access. This is very significant in determining the retention as well as further adoption of users! Ultimately leading to higher ratings, downloads and revenue.
Network compatibility
The type of network connection you want users to have when using your app is a difficult concept to capture. A user might have 5G/4G/3G connectivity, but it’s possible that he or she will have limited connectivity. It’s also possible for users to be using a 2G network.
Pro tip: To make sure the app works seamlessly regardless of the network it is being used on, it is best to test how your app reacts when the network abruptly changes from WiFi to mobile data or vice versa. To make sure your app works seamlessly on any network, it is best to test your app under different network conditions.
This can also be done effortlessly using cloud-based app providers that offer a wide range of testing solutions.
Final thoughts
The market for mobile apps is one of the biggest industries around. Because it’s so competitive, app makers have to put a lot of effort into developing high-quality apps. Users can make up their mind about an app quickly, so developers need to focus on making sure that their products are top-notch from beginning to end.
At Zuci, we help you achieve a 4 + rating for your mobile app using our proven and industry-standard practices. Check out now.
Get our mobile app testing experts to evaluate how your app performs in real-life conditions.
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