Best Practices for Mobile App Testing

Mobile app testing can be a highly critical and time-consuming process. It helps ensure the mobile app meets all usability, compatibility, and functional requirements. Users prefer apps that are not only well-designed but also offer a bug-free experience and have plenty of inventive features.

To meet user requirements successfully, mobile app testing and development teams need to integrate certain practices that can help them deliver high-quality and flawless mobile apps.

In this post, we'll talk about the challenges teams face during mobile app testing and discuss some of the best practices for mobile app testing and development that can help meet crucial UX goals.

Common Mobile App Testing Challenges

Here are some of the most common mobile app testing challenges:

1. 1. Device fragmentation and compatibility issues: Smartphones and tablets have different screen sizes, designs, aspect ratios, operating systems, and hardware specifications. Therefore, ensuring your mobile app works flawlessly on different devices and versions is necessary.


2. 2. Network connectivity and bandwidth limitations: Your app's performance should remain consistent on all types of network connections and bandwidths. Smartphones are often used on the go, and the network connectivity and bandwidth specifications in every location vary significantly. Hence, QA teams must test the performance of their mobile apps for different network conditions, such as intermittent connectivity or low bandwidth, to ensure that the app delivers consistently smooth performance under all scenarios.


3. 3. Mobile-specific user interactions and gestures: Smartphones have different gestures and touch-based shortcuts like swipes, pinch-to-zoom, and taps, allowing users to perform certain tasks seamlessly. If your app uses any of these gestures or touch-based interactions, testing their functionality and ensuring that the app responds appropriately is important.


4. 4. Security and privacy concerns: Smartphone users are very concerned about the security of their data. They want their online activity metrics to remain confidential. Therefore, every mobile app development company must ensure their app is safe from all kinds of security threats through rigorous testing. They must also regularly update security patches to promptly address various privacy concerns.


5. 5. Rapidly evolving mobile technologies and operating systems: Mobile phone technologies constantly evolve. Smartphone manufacturers always try to add new features and functionalities to their devices to improve user experience and security. However, every mobile app development company must ensure their apps are on par with the advancements in mobile technologies and operating systems. Teams must perform in-depth QA to ensure their app remains compatible and perfectly functional.


6. 6. Integration with third-party services and APIs: Many mobile apps rely on third-party services and APIs. For instance, if a user has to log in to your app, it's important to ensure they can log in through other platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. However, ensuring that these integrations work seamlessly and reliably requires proper testing.


7. 7. Localization and internationalization considerations: Localization of mobile apps for diverse languages and cultures is becoming quite common. Testing for different scenarios ensures the app works smoothly across different regions and cultures.


8. 8. Performance and battery consumption optimization: Your mobile app should be light on power and resource consumption. Users want their smartphones to last long without plugging them in, and if an app is consuming more power and resources than it should, they might as well uninstall it from their device, which is something you don't want. While ensuring power efficiency, ensure the app's performance doesn't take a hit.


9. 9. Limited resources and time for testing: Sometimes, mobile app development cycles are quite short, which limits the availability of time and resources required for testing. This is a challenge, but an experienced team of testers and QA engineers know how to use time and resources smartly and deliver a great digital product that works properly.


10. 10. Balancing functionality and usability testing: Every mobile app development company needs to balance functionality and usability while developing and testing mobile apps. Testing mobile apps for both can be challenging, but ensuring a successful mobile app is important. Balancing functionality and usability requires prioritization and careful planning.

8 Practices for Mobile App Testing Every QA Team Must Consider

Here are some mobile app testing practices recommended by our experts to ensure seamless and flawless QA:

1. 1. Test early and often: Testing your app frequently early in the development process is one of the best practices for mobile app testing, according to our highly experienced experts. It allows you to catch bugs early in the development pipeline before they become massive issues and become harder and more expensive to fix. Testing throughout the development cycle ensures that new features and updates won't introduce new issues or bugs. Early and frequent testing can also help catch issues in the requirement and design phases that can help prevent rework costs later on.


2. 2. Focus on user experience: User experience can make or break a mobile app. Hence, while creating a mobile app testing strategy, user experience should be one of the prime objectives. Test your app for UX elements like responsiveness, intuitiveness, and ease of use. You should also ensure your app is straightforward, minimalistic, feature-rich, and user-friendly.


3. 3. Test on real devices: You can test your mobile app on virtual devices. However, we won't recommend it. While testing your mobile app on a real device, you'll identify many potential issues that might not appear on simulators and emulators. Moreover, some bugs are hardware related, so we recommend testing your mobile apps and ensuring their compatibility with a wide range of hardware.


4. 4. Test for different network conditions: Mobile phones are often used in different network conditions, such as in locations with weak signals or low bandwidth. Therefore, it's important to ensure your app works flawlessly under these conditions through thorough mobile app testing.


5. 5. Automate testing: Automated testing saves time and improves testing efficiency. Unlike manual testing, this mobile app testing technique can also help you detect issues faster, perform more tests in less time, and catch errors. However, performing automation and manual testing is critical because some errors can only be detected through human interaction.


6. 6. Utilize analytics and user feedback: Using analytics is important for measuring the success of your mobile app. It can help you understand how users interact with your mobile app, track progress frequently, and identify potential bugs. User feedback also provides valuable insights regarding the things you like or dislike about your mobile app, which will help you make improvements and fix bugs.


7. 7. Test for security vulnerabilities: Mobile app security is crucial because users keep personal and sensitive information on their smartphones. Testing your app for vulnerabilities might help you spot and resolve issues before hackers exploit them.


8. 8. Establish a testing plan: Developing a straightforward testing plan that describes the testing approach, tools, and schedules is critical to ensuring thorough and comprehensive testing. A well-defined testing strategy can help you stay organized, prioritize testing efforts, and measure success. It also helps ensure that everyone involved in the development process is aware of the testing process and their role in it.

The Best Mobile App Testing Tool For You

These practices can help you deliver high-quality and bug-free applications. However, if you don’t have the right test management tool at your disposal, you’ll struggle to produce accurate results and deliver flawless mobile apps. Testworthy streamlines your QA processes, ensures better collaboration, and improve testing results significantly.