With almost 3.5 million smartphone users, it is no surprise that the mobile application industry is flying high. App usage and smartphone penetration are growing at an exponential rate. If you take a minute and look around, you will find that almost everyone is glued to their screens. We use our phones while at work, at home, lying down in bed, and even while eating. A pertinent question to ask would be: what exactly do we do on our phones?
Most people use applications on their phones, which exponentially increases with the time they spend on their mobiles. There are over 3.48 million apps available on Google Play Store. According to recent studies, millennials have around 35 to 40 apps on their phones, out of which they spend time on approximately 18 of them.
Since many apps get developed every day, testing these apps is crucial. If an app has a glitch before it gets launched in the market, that error needs to be corrected. Mobile app testing ensures that the apps get tested for functionality, consistency, and usability. However, performance and speed are also vital factors that are checked before launching an app.
What is mobile app performance testing?
Every app goes through a performance test. A performance test is different from a functionality test. A functionality test determines whether the app is responding correctly or not. A performance test determines the various other aspects of the app, like its speed.
Performance testing is vital since it establishes the durability of an app over multiple areas. QA engineers simulate real-life usage environments to run these tests. It helps them to experience for themselves what a user will feel while using the application. This is the prime difference between functionality testing and performance testing.
Mobile app performance testing determines various arenas like speed, user-friendliness, volume testing, scalability, usability testing, load testing, stress testing, etc. When the application goes through performance testing, it is crucial to ensure that the app works according to SLA (Service Level Agreement). SLA is a written agreement that specifies the service committed by a vendor to its user in terms of quality and quantity. The test should also ensure that the app will work even at the time of low connectivity.
The overall process of mobile app performance testing includes:
Why do we need mobile app performance testing?
Mobile performance application tests determine the application's overall performance, which is a big part of your business. A performance test helps to determine the application's working in unfavorable conditions like low network strength, sharing resources with multiple applications, etc.
An app is created with a purpose to fulfil some desire of its user. For example, apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat connect users from across the world. Apps like Zomato and Swiggy help users order food; Weather or Forecast offers information about the weather. To ensure that an app perfectly performs its functions, a mobile app performance test is crucial. Sometimes when an app performs poorly, most of its customers never use it again.
A study found that 9 out of 10 times users stopped using a particular app because it responded poorly.
Therefore, it becomes vital to test an app before launching it.
Let us understand this with another example. Consider two companies, A and B, that are new in the market. Their prime business takes place through their online protocol and apps. Both the companies deal in styling products. Both company's apps are user-friendly, but company A's app does not work efficiently when connected to a slower network or changes drastically when the location of the user changes. Because of these glitches, company A is losing its customers, and company B is gaining an advantage. It will drastically affect the business of company A.
To avoid such hurdles in your business and promote growth, a mobile app performance test is indispensable.
Performance metrics for mobile applications
Every app that gets measured can improve as well. There is always room for improvement. An app has to go through many levels of testing, modifications, and re-testing to become high quality. To assess the standard of apps, we must first understand the different performance metrics.
Challenges in mobile app performance testing
Testing a mobile app can be very challenging. While undergoing performance tests, many issues arise related to the load, speed, response time, etc. A few of these challenges are listed below:
Planning and strategy
Planning and forming a good strategy for the performance test is a very crucial step. Creating a fool-proof strategy plan from scratch can be difficult. But the good news here is that testers and developers can examine existing performance test samples.
These are the steps required for planning:
Factors affecting mobile app performance
There can be various factors affecting the performance of a mobile app, such as:
Best tools and frameworks
Conclusion
To ensure that the app is indeed useful and delivers its intended result, mobile app performance testing is a necessary step. Mobile app performance test helps to check various metrics such as average crash time, the response time of the app, network errors. It also helps in finding solutions to these problems. For a business, this is an essential step since its credibility lies in the app. The scale of growth and revenue of the company also depends upon this. If the app performs well, it ensures more downloads, recommendations, and popularity, leading to booming business. When developing a performance test, the developer has to carefully take into consideration all the necessary fields such as different devices, identify the key performance factors, prioritize scenarios. Planning and strategizing are very crucial. We believe in the deep integration and testing of an application to provide the best possible stability and performance. With our end-to-end quality assurance and testing services, we promise to deliver error-free and high-performing mobile apps. To know more about our quality assurance services click here.