Oct 18th, 2024
Future-Proofing Your Mobile Apps: Impact of Performance and Scalability Testing
There’s an old saying that goes, “Ideas are a dime a dozen,” and nowhere is that truer than in the world of mobile apps. It feels like everyone, and their mom today is building a mobile app. The space is crowded just like all other online spaces and standing out takes more than just a good idea.
Mobile users these days are savvy: they don’t tolerate poorly performing apps. Implementation is key and will not only help your app rise to the top in a sea of sluggish, buggy, low-quality apps, but will help it stay there for years to come.
The best way to ensure that your mobile app is high-quality and ready to be put in front of users is by testing your mobile apps rigorously. In this article, we’ll talk about the various ways you can test mobile apps, as well as how to build with scalability and future-proofing in mind.
Mobile App Testing and Why is it Important
Mobile app testing involves evaluating and validating your mobile application to assess its usability, performance, and scalability before it is released to the market.
Benefits of Testing your Mobile Apps
- Detecting and fixing bugs and vulnerabilities in your mobile app
- Ensuring compatibility of your mobile app with third-party platforms, devices, and various external conditions
- Improving the UI/UX of mobile apps to enhance accessibility and navigation
- Strengthening security against hacking and external threats that could compromise your personal information
- Identifying issues during the early stages of mobile app development to reduce costs and accelerate time to market
Types of Mobile App Testing
1. Usability testing
This is the most basic, and some would argue, necessary, testing you will do on your mobile app. Determine that the things you built in the UI work. Much of this can and should be handled by writing automated unit tests that run every time the app is deployed.
2. Performance testing
This is the most important type of testing for future-proofing your app. You need to understand how it performs under various types of loads and conditions.
3. Load testing
Load testing determines whether the app performs as expected under various user loads. You should test the app under normal traffic conditions and under peak expected traffic conditions. This will help you find bottlenecks and performance issues.
4. Capacity testing
This type of testing helps you figure out what loads your app should be expected to take. It will tell you the maximum number of users the app will support before performance begins to degrade. This is one of the best ways to figure out how and when to start scaling, and to set up load tests.
5. Volume testing
Volume testing is similar to capacity testing, but it refers specifically to the way data flows through the app. It lets you understand how the app handles data under various loads, and what happens to the data if things go wrong.
6. Spike testing
Spike testing and stress testing measure the app’s performance under high-stress situations, such as a sudden influx of users.
7. Network testing
Network testing allows you to test your app under various network conditions. Remember: not all users have access to high-speed internet. Knowing how your app performs under less-than-ideal network conditions allows you to better understand the experience that all your users are having.
Challenges in Mobile App Testing
Building a highly performant mobile app requires rigorous testing, but testing mobile applications isn’t always easy. From simulating network conditions to mocking user loads, testing can be complicated to get right.
1. Simulating real scenarios
It’s not easy to account for every type of condition your app may encounter. Users access the web in a variety of different ways: 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, another mobile phone’s hotspot. Simulating all types of network conditions is tedious but necessary if you want to make sure all users are having a good experience.
2. Device and OS compatibility
There are many different ways to do mobile app development: from native implementations like Swift for iOS or Gradle for Android, to React Native or Flutter, which allow you to build cross-platform apps that work on multiple platforms. Regardless of whether your app is proprietary or cross-platform, you will need to make sure it performs as expected on any platforms it is supposed to work on.
3. Capturing metrics
Determine what metrics you need to measure before you begin the design process. You’ll want to build user tracking and click-capturing methods into the UI. Figuring out what to track at the end, after the app has been built, will cause you to miss out on a lot of valuable data.
4. Pinpointing issues
Just because testing has been implemented, doesn’t mean it will be easy to track down the root causes of some problems. Automated testing can only take you so far in some cases, you will just need to have QA or developers sit down and manually debug an issue.
In Conclusion
Testing particularly performance testing is the best way to future-proof your mobile applications and rise to the top in a crowded space. It will make sure that the app you release to end users is robust and secure and delivers a high-quality experience to all types of users every single time.
