Gone are the days when people used to turn on their PC/laptop for watching online content, surfing the internet, sending batteries for iphones emails, or even conducting online meetings. Nowadays, mobility solutions have taken over the market where handheld devices serve most of the everyday functions. Considering that mobile apps have become a very crucial element of our daily lives, it becomes very crucial for the mobile app developers to deliver faultless mobile apps. In this article, I’ll take you through the process of mobile app testing, but first, let’s know the types of mobile app testing, its significance, and the strategies that should be followed while testing a mobile app.Mobile App Testing – Significance

Testing mobile apps is more challenging than testing web or desktop applications because of three reasons. First, there is a larger variety of mobile devices that exist in comparison to web applications. This is because of the  different screen aspect ratios and hardware configurations like processing speed and available memory that are apparent on a mobile. Second, different mobile operating systems are being used by different mobile manufacturers like Android and iOS. Third, the operating system versions keep upgrading and thus it becomes crucial to test if the mobile app is compatible with the newer OS version.

Like every other application, mobile app testing is also very important as for certain apps, the clientele is millions and hence, an app with bugs is never appreciated. Launching an app with faults results in brand image damage and monetary losses or sometimes, it can lead to legal issues as well.Types of Mobile App Testing

To address all the potential issues that can occur after launching the mobile app, the following types of tests are performed for almost every mobile app.

• Usability testing – Mobile app usability testing makes sure that the app user interface and experience is easy to understand and use which improves user satisfaction.
• Compatibility testing – A mobile app has to be compatible with multiple mobile devices, operating systems, browsers, screen sizes. Compatibility testing makes sure that the app runs perfectly on different environments, specified in the requirement document.
• User Interface and Experience testing – UI/UX testing is for making the menu, buttons, navigation flow, and many other UI/UX elements at par with the user expectations.
• Low-level resource testing – issues related to device memory usage, auto-deletion of cache memory and temp files, and local database management comes under low-level resource testing.
• Performance testing – Testing mobile app performance for the required mobile networks and making sure that the app doesn’t crash in several scenarios. Also, analysing the device battery consumption while using the app and monitoring the mobile API usage bottlenecks.
• Operational testing – Testing the backup and recovery plan in case the battery goes down or ensuring no data loss while updating the mobile app from app stores.
• Installation testing – It includes validating the app by installing and uninstalling it on several different mobile devices.
• Security testing – Testing the application to ensure that the user data is safe from phishing or any other cyber attacks.