Over the last decade, the usage of mobile devices has risen globally. As per the prediction of Statista, the number of smartphone users will exceed 1.5 billion in the year 2040. Therefore, it’s manageable to envision the significant challenges related to mobile app testing that the future and current teams will deal with.
The increase in mobile devices has led to increasing demand for mobile apps worldwide. It has led to huge organizations investing mainly in this area, raising the requirement for more conducive mobile app cloud testing solutions.
This post will explore significant mobile app testing challenges that sometimes create a hedge in turning things around and push the technical team into a dilemma.
Mobile App Testing Challenges
Mobile app testing is undoubtedly not a piece of cake. It needs a lot of time & effort to test apps on multiple platforms. There are various mobile app testing tools and approaches, but the essential thing for every developer is to design a product of the best quality – meeting the users’ expectations. The significant difficulty for testers is that there are multiple ways to test mobile apps. And each side has its advantages and disadvantages, which can be tough to find out in advance.
So, glance at some of the significant challenges that testers and developers face.
1. Homogenous Mixture of Mobile Applications
When we talk about mobile apps, the first and foremost thing that comes to your mind is several mobile app icons. Although native mobile applications are the only set of applications we are communicating about, the overall image is more vital as mobile apps include Hybrid and web apps. Each one has a distinct feature of testing processes and setting challenges.
While undergoing the mobile app testing process, we should address particular threats for each. We can’t only be satisfied with a textbook-level solution when it’s about finding solutions for all the mobile apps. For instance, a web app wouldn’t be capable enough to keep the data and information on a mobile device, but the situation would be different for native applications.
This trait would make much faster communications in native application data compared to web applications. Thus, always remember that we develop and design the scenarios and use cases for mobile application testing as per the kind of app we are currently dealing with.
2. Device Fragmentation
One of the most significant challenges of mobile app testing is device fragmentation since the total number of active applications running an application escalates yearly. This can create a crucial compatibility issue since mobile app testing teams have to guarantee that these apps can not be expanded across operating systems such as iOS, Android, Windows, and more. But also across multiple versions of the exact OS, such as iOS6 and iOS 5. iOS 14, etc.
However, one can resolve this challenge by simply using a cloud-based mobile application testing solution. A cloud-based mobile application testing will make it easier to:
- Test the application on several iOS simulators and Android emulators
- Dependent on the cloud for speedy deliveries and so on
- Upload the application in one click
- Monitor the applications’ quality
3. Multiple Screen Sizes
Similar to the problem of OS, we have another variable in the market, i.e., screen size. The screen size of mobile devices has been a selling pitch for most sellers, attracting customers to go for bigger phones. These trends in device manufacturing require a change or advancement in applications’ development.
Unlike earlier, the requirement to develop apps to increase the size of mobile screens is essential in the market. We can only make a mobile application that will look after some devices’ screen sizes separately. Therefore, multiple screen sizes in mobile app testing become a considerable challenge.
4. Volatile User Needs
User needs are a volatile process. They fluctuate according to time. Sometimes a customer wants a subscription button embedded in the bottom right corner. And sometimes they want to erase the sign-up button & register using a different path.
There are thousands of similar cases and scenarios, and one can never predict what one expects. New trends or evil designs can also influence or attract users’ needs. Because of this, user needs are ever-changing, becoming a massive mobile app testing challenge.
5. Multiple Mobile Applications
Mobile app development is the perfect way to attract new customers, increase your brand’s visibility, and give their customers a better experience. Keeping the same in mind, let’s glance at the three major types of mobile device testing apps – web, native, and Hybrid.
Web Apps: Web applications are primarily similar to native apps, except the user is not required to install the former explicitly. Instead, web apps are embedded within the website, easily accessible to users through web browsers on their mobile devices.
Native Apps: Native apps are designed mainly for OS specific devices. Therefore, apps designed for iOS won’t work on other OS or Android and vice versa. These applications come with advanced phone features, fast speed, and offer higher efficiency.
Hybrid Apps: Hybrid applications have features of both the apps – web & native. These applications have been built like native apps. Some of its features are – it has a short loading time and needs less maintenance.
6. Battery Space Variation
Like screen sizes, battery capacity also falls under a selling pitch for most mobile manufacturers. With every newer arrival of a mobile device, its battery capacity also increases.
And because of this, mobile applications have changed significantly and become heavier. A heavier application requires more energy leading to low battery.
Also, energy improvements have been made in recent years like brighter device screens, live wallpapers, extended mobile app capabilities, and more. Still, we find users complaining about their exhausted batteries in the mid of the day.
7. Mobile Network Bandwidth
Mobile network bandwidth testing is a vital part of mobile application testing. Consumers often expect mobile applications with high speed. But that’s not it. A mobile application that fails to develop faster results sometimes needs to improve in data communication.
An app that needs to be optimized and tested to suit the bandwidth of various users will stay behind during the transfer of information between the server and the end user. Therefore, the challenge arises: testers should test their mobile website and applications in multiple network conditions to understand their response time in each scenario. This shall make the procedure more efficient and the app more sustainable.
8. Mercurial User Expectations
Consumers from all over the world expect distinct features from their smartphones. Organizations comply by giving variations to allure their target audience. With the variety in models come expectations as to what multiple apps running on mobile devices should perform and how.
Similarly, users have a lot of high demands from the applications that they are using. They are repetitively demanding changes and updates to ease their things.
A technical team of app developers can’t help but bury their minds into providing their consumers with what they wish to guarantee that the user’s experience is good and business is on track. And this whole process is quite challenging for the testing team, so they must be on their toes in many cases.
9. Security Matter
Security issues can become a significant roadblock for the testing team. Although cloud-based mobile app testing tools such as PCloudy is secure, there are still various issues that developers face regularly:
Bad encryption: Poor or no encryption in mobile apps can invite hackers and fuel all your problems.
Easy access to cache: Mobile devices are prone to breaches as it is easy to access. Therefore, suspicious programs can easily reach private data through mobile apps unless any tested app is designed to make all the vulnerabilities null and void.
Takeaways
In all, it is now more apparent that mobile app testing is not a piece of cake and requires a lot of processes to maintain secrecy, performance, user expectations, multiple screen sizes, etc.
Thus, it is advisable to face those challenges and come out of them through various ways like using:
- Standard rules that are common to all devices
- Mobile emulators
- Leverage cloud-based platform
And if you come across any other solution for it, Bingo! Because it’s best to keep seeking and investigating help wherever required.
