Testing Mobile Apps & Software: Top challenges that a tester face

The mobile boom is clear and it's pretty clear they're here to remain. The smart-phones are chop-chop changing into the first methodology of interaction for shoppers and businesses worldwide, with thousands of apps being generated on a daily basis. Mobile goes on the far side smartphones and tablets. Apps are currently being incorporated into cars, wearable school, and residential appliances

The phenomenal growth of mobile devices has unfolded avenues for organizations to integrate them into the computing atmosphere. Today’s mobile applications deliver complicated practicality on platforms that have restricted resources for computing. Diversity presents distinctive challenges that need unique testing ways. In this article, we will understand the top challenges that a tester faces by testing mobile apps and software.

According to the CapGemini Quality Report (Mobile Testing), 18% of responding firms say that they are not having enough time to check mobile apps, and 65% don't have the proper tools. Also, 52% cite a scarcity of devices as a reason to not do Mobile Testing. So below we mentioned the top challenges that a tester face by testing mobile apps and software.

Operating Systems 

As the usage of smartphones is developing, the clients are also getting smarter with phone usage. They are utilizing their phones to download more up to date apps, see sites, be active on social systems administration destinations, make purchases, and also maintain business communications. As the phone demands are increasing and usage patterns are changing, the expectations from mobile operating systems are also developing.

There are many mobile operating systems in the market today and each operating framework has numerous renditions. The multifaceted nature of bolstered platforms has gone to a new level. At the point when you make your app compatible with KitKat, Lollipop is already there and you start hearing the report about Marshmallow (you realize what I mean!).

Organizations need to make sure that their apps are genuinely gadget agnostic and function admirably on various operating systems and their forms. This issue increases when there are different mobile programs and their forms to be tested.

Multitude of Mobile Devices 

Over 500m Android devices sent since Android 1.0, about 220m iOS devices have been delivered since 2007. These gigantic number of mobile devices availability ranging from handsets to smartphones, to tabs, to pads and wearable tech gives a tremendous variety of situations which your mobile app faces.

Further, the quality team cannot guarantee that if a tested application functions admirably on a given gadget, it will work 100% on another gadget regardless of whether it's from the same item family because the screen goals, CPU, Memory, OS optimization, and hardware could be different.

Screen Sizes 

In March 2015, Tim Cook announced that Apple has sold more than 700 million iPhones altogether. It is estimated that before the finish of 2014 3 billion Android smartphones were sold. At that point, there are Windows phones and Blackberry as well. While we have the numbers for popular brands, there is also no dearth of many local players who are ceaselessly launching new phones. Each new form of the phone perhaps accompanies another screen size.

Thanks to the changing mobile behaviors, shoppers are adapting to and reacting decidedly to the screen size changes. Organizations today have no decision yet to tweak their mobile apps structure and the behavior to adapt to the new phones and keep on offering exceptional client experience to all the clients across various smartphones and screen sizes. For each geography, the favored selection of devices is different and thus you may have the option to cover 90% of your app clients through a variety of 5-6 phones.

Nonetheless, if you have to test various mobile apps catering to a variety of audiences in different geographical locations, if your mobile app testing lab has just 7-8 devices, taking a gander at the vast smartphone market, you are probably covering just 25% of your clients.

Different Mobile App Types 

A mobile app can be a native app, a web app or a half and half app that has the two substances. Testing of each such app type is different than another as their implementation is very different from each other. As we see each app behavior from installation to capability is extraordinary from each other, we understand that their testing and test coverage will also be different. For more details on it, you can allude to the Beginner's Guide to Mobile Testing

Battery Life 

Battery life has been the greatest complaint of smartphone clients and mobile clients are exceptionally touchy about phone battery life. Each smartphone manufacturer is battling to enable faster performance, better gaming, video seeing and so on while giving a long battery life. On top of this, on the off chance that any app further drains the battery, at that point, the clients don't hesitate to uninstall such apps. While app designers need to take care of battery utilization, it is also the duty of the testers to guarantee that apart from the app features, usability, and stability, they test the apps for power utilization as well.

Numerous Test Interfaces 

Mobile emulators and simulators are an important testing apparatus and they enable us to confirm general functionality and perform regular Regression Testing. The very character of emulators and simulators means testing is being directed in a situation that isn't real. The advantages of such tools are restricted in scope, and ought to never be viewed as a substitute for the real-world. Utilizing emulators and simulators in tandem with in-the-wild testing will give you the best outcomes.

Performance 

Mobile apps must account for restricted and variable system bandwidth. Indeed, even a shared mobile system can have a significant impact on the performance of the app. The mobile apps clients are exceptionally impatient with moderate performance. Research by The Aberdeen Group has revealed that around 25 percent of app clients abandon a mobile app on the off chance that they experience a delay of over three seconds. The performance testing is a fairly technical activity that includes testing of numerous aspects, for example, CPU utilization, memory utilization, cache size availability, memory leakage by the app, web data usage, offline data usage, caching, and a number of trips there and back and so on.

Variety of Testing Tools 

Summarizing the daunting multifaceted nature of mobile test automation, considerably progressively, daunting is the enormous availability of mobile test automation tools in the market. Free/Paid. For a native app or web app? For Android or iOS, so which is the one automation instrument for your mobile test automation needs, or the inquiry is – Is there a solitary device for our Mobile Test automation needs?

Security 

We as a whole continue reading the anecdotes about site hacking and data leaks. Organizations are also attempting to guarantee apps security. Stats recommend that over half of the apps don't take enough precautions while revealing the verified information about the application or clients and many apps don't have legitimate encryption techniques. Mobile app testers need to have a profound understanding of security testing.

These gigantic number of mobile devices availability ranging from handsets to smartphones, to tabs, to pads and wearable tech gives a tremendous variety of situations which your mobile app faces. Nonetheless, if you have to test various mobile apps catering to a variety of audiences in different geographical locations, if your mobile app testing lab has just 7-8 devices, taking a gander at the vast smartphone market, you are probably covering just 25% of your clients.

Different Mobile App Types A mobile app can be a native app, a web app or a half and half app that has the two substances. While app designers need to take care of battery utilization, it is also the duty of the testers to guarantee that apart from the app features, usability, and stability, they test the apps for power utilization as well.

The performance testing is a fairly technical activity that includes testing of numerous aspects, for example, CPU utilization, memory utilization, cache size availability, memory leakage by the app, web data usage, offline data usage, caching, and a number of trips there and back and so on.