What Are Possible Mistakes While Testing Mobile App?

Mobile app testing is like a one-way road with no way of going back, and it is ultimately responsible for making or breaking the app’s success. The app’s future is in the hands of the users as a single flaw in the app can make the users shun the app. It signals having a sound app testing strategy in place is all-imperative to ensure that the mobile app meets the user expectations and help the businesses achieve their goal.

However, the release of new OS, frameworks, devices, or APIs constantly, make the job of testers challenging. How to overcome all the challenges? The team at TopDevelopers.co have done some research to provide a concise list of the mistakes to avoid while testing the mobile app. To guarantee that the mobile app will make its way to the app store without a single bug and become a successful one, avoid them without any mistake.

Mobile App Testing Mistakes You should avoid

User Experience

The most important task of the testing is user experience testing, as 90% of the app’s triumph depends on the users. Presently, the user’s expectations have increased by a great length, which uplifts the testing efforts in the same proportion to let the app create a buzz in the app store.

Testing the app functionalities is not enough, the testers should test the user journey, UI/UX, user interactions, responsive design, visual issues, user feedback and navigation precisely to make certain the users get delighted every time they browse the app.

Functionality of App

The core functionalities of the app and how they are implemented need to be checked to ensure they are working properly. Also, it must be scrutinized what would happen when the user performs an action that the application cannot handle because the consequences of these non-designed tasks may lead to app crashes.

It’s essential to examine how the app reacts in response or gets affected when the user activity is interrupted on the app for a smooth user experience. The interruptions can be incoming phone calls, text messages, battery notifications, other app notifications or system updates.

Physical Device

It’s the main problem from which QA and testers suffer the most. The mobile world has multiple platforms and devices, and again numerous versions of the OSs for every device. All the OS versions and devices are packed with different capabilities, which makes the testing difficult by hundred folds. Ignoring the app testing on every device is not a good idea, but it’s a waste of effort when you test the app on devices or OSs which are not supported.

The best way is to create a list of devices and platforms that the app will support and then test the app on all the real devices. Even, a single widely used physical device should not be avoided and confirm that the app offers a consistent experience everywhere.  Just the emulators and simulators are not aplenty. However, the emulators can be considered to test the app on older versions.

App Performance

Very often, trivial things such as battery consumption, memory leaks, or internet connectivity are unnoticed, which raises the app’s performance and scalability issues.

The testers must identify the redundant code to eradicate the memory leak problem, check the features that continue working even when the app is closed as they drain the battery and if the app is having a server-side component, the app’s loading speed with increasing users should be constantly checked to avoid delays due to server problems.

Also, the app’s behavior in weak signal conditions, the network transition from Wi-Fi to 4G or network bandwidth usage are important to test for wide coverage.

Globalization

When the app is targeting a global audience, properly checking the app’s adaptability to different geography is a must for worldwide acceptance. The variation in languages, currencies and social interaction according to the different nations give the users a feel of personal touch and which should be tested to boost up the app downloads and retention rates.

Additionally, users from particular countries are banned from accessing certain apps or are authorized to be made available at only particular locations, so make sure the restriction rules are properly defined.

Restriction of Permissions for App

Many mobile apps make requests to get access to personal information, contact number, or SMS on the device other than the internet connection, location data, and camera. The unnecessary permission requests to use the user’s private data on the smartphone ruffle up the users’ feather.

The testers should ensure that after installation, the app should not make any such request or reduce it to places where it is utmost required. It can be achieved by checking log files, device storage, log cases and stack traces by connecting the mobile device with a computer.

Mobile App Security

Both manual testing and automation testing are important for the mobile app to verify and validate that there exists no human error condition in the app and that the app is compatible with new OS releases or upgrades. However, the testing doesn’t safeguard the app from malware or vulnerabilities. Maintaining data privacy and providing security assurance are all-important to win the users’ trust.

The proper encoding of data, use of secure network protocols, type of permission requests, user authentication before giving access to the data, user credential encryption, app interaction with third-party software or a maximum number of login attempts to get the app locked must be checked. The other way to easily test the security-related scenarios and look for vulnerabilities is by routing the mobile through a proxy server.

Conclusion

Testing is indispensable. Top testing companies keep testing the application to launch the bugs-free app, as an app with bugs is equal to trash.

A holistic approach to testing and considering these mistakes ensures the quality and success of the app. The testers can win at the mobile app testing with the right mix of testing strategy planning, user experience testing, testing on emulators and physical devices, global acceptance testing, performance testing, and security testing.

It’s the right move toward an up-and-coming app release. Don’t hang fire. Go for it!