Mobile App Testing | 13 Key Challenges
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The mobile boom is obvious and it is pretty clear they are here to stay. The smart-phones are rapidly becoming the primary method of interaction for consumers and businesses worldwide, with thousands of app being generated each day. Mobile goes beyond smart-phones and tablets. Apps are now being incorporated into cars, wearable tech and home appliances.
Today’s mobile applications deliver complex functionality on platforms that have limited resources for computing. The movement towards mobile devices has brought a whole different set of challenges to the testing world. Mobile users are not forgiving and finding an issue out in the wild might mean leaving the application for good. Diversity presents unique challenges that require unique testing strategies.
Device Fragmentation & Various OS Platforms
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the mobile testing matrix is Device fragmentation. Whether testing on 5-8 devices is enough? Over 500m Android devices shipped since Android 1.0, about 220m iOS devices have been shipped since 2007. Devices ranging from handsets, to smart phones, to tabs, to iPad and wearable tech provides a huge diversity of environments – Shapes and sizes, Screen resolution, Input methods, CPU, Memory, OS optimization and hardware could be different.
Though the iOS device matrix is growing more than ever, fragmentation is especially an issue for the Android operating system. If you’re concerned with quality on cross-platform apps, you’ll encounter a similarly complicated matrix. Although less daunting than the hardware matrix, the variety of mobile operating systems also poses a challenge for engineering teams whose goal is to provide a consistent user experience across platforms. The number of possible permutations is intimidating.
Mobile App Types
Mobile apps come in a few different flavors. Apps can be Native, Web, or Hybrid- and the testing implementation changes drastically with each one. Aside from having a different architecture, apps can have significantly different functionality, performance, and capabilities. As a result, the app behavior differs from installation to functionality and the combination of process, methodology, and tools is very different for the different types of mobile applications being tested.