Mobile phones have dominated the market in recent years. They have progressed from essential communication to versatile technology. People want their mobile phones to rapidly complete every task, whether online banking, shopping, paying bills, ordering meals, or calling a cab. Utilizing all these resources encourages the creation of advanced mobile apps since they serve as the foundation for innovative ways of human engagement with technology.
Because of this, mobile apps must be sufficiently optimized for the specific device to function successfully. To ensure outstanding functionality and performance of the app on the newest mobile devices and keep a competitive edge, organizations must place mobile app testing at the core of their testing strategy.
Mobile app testing is essential to an app’s survival in the current market. Before an application is made available on the app stores, a thorough testing procedure gives developers the peace of mind that the quality will be maintained. Each mobile application that gets created must undergo a testing process focused on usability, security, functionality, and performance. This boosts both the application’s overall effectiveness and the users’ impression of its reliability.
Using automated testing solutions, such as Appium, allows organizations to confirm that their mobile applications function as intended and satisfy end users’ needs. It also helps to cut down on the time that the mobile application takes to build.
This article will cover every aspect of using Appium to test on mobile devices. We will first go over what mobile device and mobile app testing means, why it is crucial to test them, and what difficulties testers have while performing them. We will also briefly go over what Appium is and why it is used for testing mobile devices.
Mobile device testing
To assess the reliability, functionality, and effectiveness of a mobile device, several tests are performed. Mobile device testing verifies and validates that all of a device’s functionalities, including both its hardware and software, perform as intended to affirm the device’s quality. The screen, applications, camera, and other functions are tested.
Simply defined, it is the process of putting a mobile device through a quality check to make sure it complies with all the standards and requirements before it is made available to users.
On the other hand, the technique of evaluating apps for modern mobile devices is known as mobile app testing. It only concentrates on assessing the functionality, consistency, and usability of the mobile application. The application is also tested in numerous other areas, such as its performance, security, and UI, to provide the best quality for the end users. This guarantees that the chosen application, in terms of hardware, software, connectivity, etc., is adequately matched for the device.
Types of mobile apps
Mobile applications can be classified into three categories.
Native app
Specific SDKs are used to create native apps. They were created with a particular platform or operating system in mind. They provide a more reliable, quicker, and simpler user experience since they concentrate on a single operating system.
Web apps
Web apps are comparable to native apps in many ways with the primary distinction being they are limited to mobile browsers. Any mobile operating system or mobile device can use them via a web browser.
Hybrid app
Native and web application APIs are combined in hybrid apps. The HTML and JavaScript files are shown in a full-screen format using a web view control. When compared to native apps, Hybrid apps can be created more quickly and at a lower cost.
What is Appium?
Appium is a highly effective tool for testing mobile apps. Given that it was created to run tests on both Android and iOS devices as well as test native, web, and hybrid applications, it is an open-source automation framework that significantly contributes to speeding the app testing process.
It is built on the WebDriver protocol and communicates with the mobile device or emulator via the Selenium JSON Wire Protocol. One of the main benefits of using Appium for app testing is its cross-platform compatibility. This feature allows testers to write a single test script using any WebDriver-compatible language, including Java, C, PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript, and execute them on a variety of devices and operating systems without modifying the codebase. Removing the requirement for separate test scripts for each platform assists testers in decreasing the time and effort needed to maintain the test suite.
The significance of using Appium for mobile device testing
Appium serves as essential for testing mobile apps since it offers strong support for various app interactions, including touch gestures, swiping taps, and more. With the aid of this tool, testers may quickly simulate actual user behaviors during testing to guarantee thorough coverage and precise test results.
Appium offers record and playback features so that users may keep track of testing and keep records of it, as well as receive instant feedback on code changes, which makes debugging easier.
Thus, the tool’s role in automating mobile app testing procedures can be used to highlight Appium’s overall significance in mobile app testing. It is the perfect option for testers wishing to increase the effectiveness and precision of their app testing efforts because of its cross-platform flexibility, support for numerous programming languages, and integration possibilities.
Why is it vital to test mobile apps?
As users spend more time on their mobile devices, the rate of mobile internet consumption is growing. Therefore, offering a positive user experience on mobile apps is crucial. Let’s explore a few of the factors that make mobile testing so important.
The greatest objective of creating mobile devices or applications is to reach more users around the world. However, it is important to keep in mind that each mobile app’s success depends largely on its first impression. If a mobile device or app is broken or difficult to use, users will be unwilling to use it. Therefore, testing them rigorously reduces the possibility that users may discover serious bugs on their devices, thus, improving the user experience.
It is important to test the mobile device experience that users are having to make sure that the app is effectively serving an extensive and expanding group of your user base. Failure to grasp this results in the app being deleted, left behind, or receiving unfavorable reviews on social media.
Regardless of the type of app being used or the platform on which it was created, mobile device testing assures a strong mobile experience.
No one wants users to delete their apps and utilize a competitor’s. Any unanticipated app crash or fault in the functionality of the application can result in being deleted. Additionally, this causes the loss of users and revenue.
Therefore, it is essential to test mobile apps to ensure that each user has the greatest experience possible. Successful mobile testing can fix all the significant problems that an application has. Additionally, flawless mobile app testing guarantees a smooth and error-free app release.
The next section discusses some of the major difficulties in testing mobile applications.
Main challenges in mobile application testing
Below is a discussion of some of the major difficulties involved with testing mobile applications.
There are many different mobile device sizes, screen resolutions, carrier settings, and operating systems. Considering users frequently utilize a variety of devices. One of the biggest issues is testing applications that function flawlessly across all of these platforms.
The compatibility and behavior of apps may be impacted by regular updates to mobile operating systems. It can be resource-intensive to keep the app updated regularly to keep up with these changes.
The connection, speed, and latency of a network might have an impact on mobile devices. It should replicate various network situations, which can be difficult to create, to test the app accurately.
Over the past few years, the battery life of mobile devices has seen a constant improvement. But as advanced and battery-consuming applications are developed, battery utilization is also rising. As a result, it can be difficult for the QA team to verify how much battery is used in various scenarios when the application is running both actively and in the background. It’s difficult to consider the power usage, particularly for the intensive activities the application will execute.
Performance testing is essential to make sure the app functions well under all circumstances and that, even when it doesn’t, users won’t experience any issues. Here, the testers’ challenge is to put the application through rigorous testing while under a lot of pressure to identify the times and locations where its performance is affected.
Mobile devices have a variety of data storage options. Testing the behavior of the application in low-storage devices gets difficult if users don’t have high-storage devices.
Streamline mobile application testing using LambdaTest
Testing a mobile application is quite challenging since testers need to make sure that the app functions properly on all of the major platforms, devices, operating systems, and versions that are currently on the market.
Therefore, it is advised to invest in the most popular and reliable technique, which is a real device cloud testing platform, as testing on a real device is always the most effective way to expedite the mobile app testing process and increase its efficiency and effectiveness. This will ease the testing effort and reduce the amount of time testers may have to spend testing mobile applications on various devices and operating systems.
With the help of LambdaTest, an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform, testers can execute both automated and manual testing of a wide range of desktop and mobile applications across more than 3000 real devices, browsers, and operating systems online.
LambdaTest is a reliable and secure cloud platform, using which testers can create automation test scripts in nearly all popular programming languages, including Ruby, Python, Java, Pearl, C#, JavaScript, etc. Additionally, testing on the LambdaTest cloud gives testers the ability to assess the speed and effectiveness of their test execution to fulfill all of their testing requirements and reach their testing objectives.
LambdaTest also provides several more advanced features, such as:
- Access to a wide range of debugging tools, such as text logs, network logs, device logs, thorough reports, and supporting screenshots and videos for both successful and failed test execution.
- Boosts DevOps and continuous delivery workflows by enabling seamless integration with well-known CI/CD solutions like Circle CI, Jenkins, Bamboo, and others.
- Supports all remote team operations by allowing retrieval of test case execution metrics reports from any location.
- Enables the execution of manual and automated browser testing visual user interface tests, responsive tests, geolocation tests, parallel tests, end-to-end regression tests, and more.
Conclusion
The need for a great app necessitates running test cases on various operating systems, network bandwidths, and screen resolutions to assess their consistency, usability, and compatibility. Automation testing can be used to create applications that are scalable and usable on several platforms.
As opposed to time-consuming, expensive, and error-prone manual testing it makes sense to use automation for a variety of repetitive tasks, such as regression and performance testing. Automation enables testers to quickly check for errors, and vulnerabilities in newly released or recent upgrades or changes to the application.
Thus, there is a need to test on a cloud platform like LambdaTest to manage all manual and automated testing in one place. To guarantee an application’s flawless execution across multiple device configurations, it offers automation of both mobile and web applications.
