Mobile App Testing: Its significance and how AstroFarm can Help

With more and more people using smartphones to access the Internet, businesses have started using mobile apps to increase reach. We see new apps hitting the market every day. However, creating a successful app is easier said than done. An app’s success depends on user reviews that, in turn, rely on the app’s performance and usability. A poor interface, performance issues, and crashes may lead to users posting bad reviews about an app. And this adversely affects the app's long-term viability. 

Thus, mobile app testing is a must for an app to succeed in the market. In this article, we will learn about mobile app testing, its significance, its challenges, and how we can overcome such challenges. 

What is mobile app testing?

Mobile app testing is the process of running tests to validate a mobile app based on certain functionality and usability parameters, such as functionality, performance, interruption, location, installation, and security. 

Mobile app testing helps ensure that an app meets the specified technical and business requirements. In order for an app to be successful, it is essential to test it across various screen resolutions, network bandwidths, and OS versions. That’s the only way to ensure that it runs flawlessly on different device configurations.   

Significance of mobile app testing

Businesses develop mobile apps to reach more customers and accelerate growth. However, customers may uninstall or abandon apps that are faulty or difficult to use. 48% of customers uninstall an app if it is slow. It’s also essential for businesses to understand what their customers are looking for before making an app. 80% of customers uninstall an app that doesn’t meet their expectations.

Launching a great app entails thorough testing. Testing helps identify critical bugs and contributes to a better user experience. Your potential customers may abandon an app if they come across functional bugs or unexpected crashes. Through testing, you can detect those issues and fix them beforehand. 

Mobile app testing falls under the following categories:

Functionality testing: This helps ensure that an app is functioning as needed.

Usability testing: This helps identify usability issues, such as slow performance and a difficult-to-use interface. 

Performance testing:  This helps understand how the app would behave/perform under critical conditions.

Interruption testing: This involves an examination of the app based on interruptions such as battery, network, SMS or incoming and outgoing calls, etc.  

Challenges of Mobile App Testing

Testing mobile apps can be quite challenging because: 

• Apps need to be tested on a variety of devices such as smartphones and tablets running on different operating systems.  
• Apps needs to be tested on different OSs like Android and iOS and their multiple versions
• A range device features, screen sizes, and resolutions need to be considered to ensure smooth functioning
• The real-time availability of corporate devices across multiple office locations needs to be checked before testing
• Transporting devices from distant locations may slow down the testing process
• Transportation costs can be high, increasing the overall app testing costs

How can AstroFarm help?

With AstroFarm, you can build your own device farm for mobile app testing. To begin, you must enroll all the devices in AstroFarm. This allows developers and testers to remotely access devices for app testing at any time and from any location. 

AstroFarm helps businesses save on transportation costs by providing remote access to all their distributed devices. This also means that they don’t have to buy the same device models for different locations. 

Ensuring that testing and DevOps teams cans access devices whenever required saves time, and helps complete testing without delay. In addition, all this contributes to a cleaner and greener app testing process, a reduced carbon footprint, and reduced e-waste as you no longer need to purchase new devices or get them transported to multiple locations.  

Let’s summarize

Mobile apps play a crucial role in connecting businesses with their customers. If an app fails to meet customer expectations, is difficult to use, or has any performance issues, it won’t have the desired impact. By performing mobile app testing, you can detect performance issues and fix them before release. And AstroFarm takes the pain out of mobile app testing by making devices available for testing from anywhere at any time.