Mobile has become an integral part of any industry; whether it is online commerce, online banking, or any other industry that is leveraging the advantages offered by growing internet penetration. As per Statista, unique mobile internet users stood at a whopping 4.28 billion[1] in 2020. This number will explode at a rapid pace in the coming years, which is the primary reason for enterprises to focus on mobile app testing.
Hybrid apps, native apps, and web apps are the three major categories of mobile applications. Irrespective of the type of the mobile app, it is essential to focus on testing the functionalities of the application from all the perspectives. QA teams involved in testing of mobile apps should focus on two major questions:
- Does the app work seamlessly across different viewports and various categories of Android & iOS devices?
- Is the app compatible with the older (yet widely used) versions of Android & iOS platforms?
Manual mobile app testing is the ideal way to kick start the test process. Once the mobile application gains wider adoption, you can follow a mix of manual mobile app testing as well as automated mobile app testing.
In this blog, we look at how you can perform manual mobile app testing at a reasonable scale and how partnering with mobile app testing services company can help in setting up the best practices for manual mobile app testing.
Why Perform Manual Mobile App Testing?
The advantages of automated testing are widely known, does that mean that manual testing is completely redundant? Best approach involves incorporating manual and automated methodologies for mobile app testing.
Manual mobile app testing is here to stay since an automated tool cannot judge the mobile application on the basis of usability, accessibility, as well as reliability. Manual testers are best suited for performing exploratory testing of mobile applications, since it helps in testing of the app taking all the corner cases into consideration.
Mobile app testing company like KiwiQA can help in planning and running manual mobile app tests at scale. Such an association can help in cases where your team does not have internal expertise to perform manual mobile app testing.
Also Read – Automation Testing Vs. Manual Testing
How To Test Mobile Applications Manually At Scale?
Now that we have covered the essentials of manual testing of mobile applications, let’s look at some of the ways in which mobile apps can be tested at a large scale.
Test on Emulators and Simulators
Procuring devices can turn out to be a costly exercise considering the plethora of devices available in the market. Each day, numerous devices from multiple OEMs (Original Device Manufacturers) are released in the market.
This is where testing mobile applications on emulators and simulators can be useful, as it helps in testing the functionalities of the app. Performance testing, fragmentation testing, and security testing of mobile applications cannot be performed on emulators and simulators. As testers, it is important to understand that emulators & simulators are installed on laptops (or desktops) that have GBs of RAM, multiple cores, and other features that are widely different from the ones we find in mobile devices.
You cannot figure out how your app is performing in terms of battery consumption on emulators and simulators. Barring these things aside, manual mobile app testing on emulators & simulators is useful since it helps in doing functional testing of the app.
In case you want to approximate real user conditions, you should opt for app testing on real mobile devices. However, testing on real devices as well as emulators & simulators can go hand-in-hand during the process of app development and testing.
Test On Old Devices and Old Browsers
Most QAs are comfortable testing mobile applications on latest versions of mobile operating systems. However, complexities can arise when you need to test same application on older versions of those platforms. In case, you are testing a web application; the same needs to be tested on latest as well as older versions of different mobile web browsers.
Prioritization of the platform, device, and browser versions needs to be done on the basis of the device usage in the target market. Based on the study, you should come up with a device compatibility matrix and browser compatibility matrix so that the QA test can prioritize devices & browsers that matter to the target audience.
Manual testing of mobile applications must be performed on latest versions of devices. However, there should be equivalent focus on optimizing the app for earlier versions of Android and iOS. This a fool proof manual mobile app testing strategy as it covers a gamut of devices and browsers that are in use by the folks of the target market.
Also Read – Top Cross Browser Testing Tools
Leverage The Benefits of Crowd Testing
Crowd testing is one of the ideal ways to involve the external community in the mobile app testing exercise. Partnering with a mobile application testing services company like KiwiQA opens up a plethora of opportunities to get access to close to 30,000+ crowd testers around the world.
The process of involving crowd testers in the process of manual mobile app testing is fairly simple. Just upload the .apk (for Android) or .ipa (for iOS) to an internal server and open up the link to the registered crowd testers (using their email addresses) to download & install the application.
Crowd testing is super beneficial since the testers can help in manual testing the app from different perspectives. They can provide feedback related to the app performance, usability, as well as positive validation of the user stories.
Also Read – Business Benefits Of Crowd Testing
Testing On Real Mobile Devices
As mentioned earlier, procuring every mobile device used by the people of the intended market could burn a hole in your pocketL. Along with crowd testing and validation on emulators & simulators, you should opt for testing on real mobile devices.
Instead of spending on procuring devices, you should opt for a cloud testing company that has a device farm. Partnering with such an organization is extremely beneficial from a scalability, reliability, as well as security point of view. You can install and test the Android & iOS applications through the use of a real device cloud that host those devices.
You can even leverage the benefits of parallel testing on real mobile devices by opting for testing using a real device cloud.
In a nutshell, you should leverage the benefits offered by manual mobile app testing on emulators & simulators as well as well testing on real mobile device cloud. This collective approach will be useful in testing the mobile app from all the perspectives!
Conclusion
The smartphone industry is witnessing an exponential growth with each passing day. Manual testing of the mobile applications should be performed at every stage to ensure that the app is performing and functioning in a top-notch manner.
A fool-proof manual mobile app testing strategy should leverage the benefits offered by crowd testing, real device cloud testing, and emulator & simulator testing. Partnering with a proven mobile app testing company like KiwiQA helps in performing manual mobile testing at scale.