Mobile Testing – The Next Frontier

Take a look at this: Over 1 billion smartphones and 179 billion mobile applications downloaded every and growing! Right from gaming, to e-commerce, finance management, healthcare, education, and social media, the phone has replaced many of the other devices, bringing services to the fingertips of the users.

Broadly five factors that contribute to this growth of mobile technology include:

Internet of Things:

The number of connected devices is going up, and the mobile device has a greater role to perform, being literally the key to unlock and access these devices as businesses build mobile apps that can smoothly integrate with the various connected devices.

According to McKinsey, the total IoT market size is expected to grow at a CAGR of 32.6 percent from $900 million in 2015 to $3.7B in 2020.

General Electric expects investment in IoT is touch $60 trillion in the next 15 years.

IHS predicts that the installed base for IoT will grow from 15.4 billion devices in 2015 to 30.7 billion devices in 2020 and 75.4 billion in 2025.

Mobile Payment:

As e-commerce matures, the next frontier in retail and mobile is mobile commerce, enabling customers to leverage fintech solutions and carry e-wallets, payment apps that make purchasing and making payments on the go easy.

Statista projects worldwide mobile payment revenue to grow from $450 billion in 2015 to $1 trillion in 2019.

One report in Invesp suggests that from the 1.6 billion people who use their mobile devices to shop online globally, it is expected to be over two billion before the end of 2017.

Social Media

The greatest hook of all is the social media, and it is not just about staying connected anymore.

It offers great potential to promote and advertise, and the advertising revenue of social networks worldwide is expected to grow from $25.14 billion in 2015 to grow to $ 41 billion in 2017, according to Statista.

Speech Recognition

Technavio reports that the global voice recognition market to reach $113.2 billion in 2017 at a five-year CAGR of 16.2 percent, with one of the key growth factors being the increasing demand for voice biometrics, especially for mobile devices.

Recently, iOS and Android provided improved speech recognition feature, enabling users to operate their devices by giving voice commands instead of the manual operation of apps.

Use of Mobile Cloud Platforms

While cloud computing on the desktop has stabilized, the benefits are rubbing off to the mobile space as well, providing enterprises and consumers access to offerings from the cloud vendors, telecom network operators, and application developers and merchants.

The global mobile cloud market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 37.8 percent from $9.43 billion in 2014 to $46.90 billion by 2019, according to Markets and Markets.

Beyond Functionality

Yes, the story looks good for mobile apps vendors. As Big Data analytics backs research and development efforts, making regular updates, new features and new products within short spans of time a possibility, the challenges to customer experience and a functioning app remain just as high as before.

The rapid developments integrating mobile and internet technologies require a revamping of the QA strategy.

QA has traditionally focused more on functionality testing, performed by mobile app testing services, but the success of an app is determined by several other factors that, if untested, create hurdles in smooth user experience right from the word go.

Some of the challenges are:

• Related to installation/uninstallation due to Play Store/Apple store crashing, OS Installer not supporting the app, not creating alerting in case of insufficient storage.
• Related to interruptions at the time of incoming call or message, low battery, etc. while accessing the app.
• Related to compatibility such as varying performance on different mobiles at different points.
• Related to interface issues that require compliance with standards
• Related to user experience issues caused by a gap between user expectations and app design, repetitive processes, usage varying patterns not accounted for in the UX, accessibility issues, etc.
• Related to performance, such as ease of completing a transaction and response times.

Any of these or more can act as desperados, changing the perception about the brand and cause customers to discard the app, thereby affecting their growth.

A Strategy for Comprehensive Testing

The QA has a critical role to play in the success of any mobile app, in addition to standard functional testing services.

A QA strategy that is comprehensive and includes every scenario critical to providing users a smooth and hitch-free experience needs to be devised right at the start.

At Indium, based on our experience, we have created dynamic jumpstart kits that comprehensively provision for new trends that can help developers and testers anticipate and address challenges right at the development and testing stages, thus ensuring the unhindered performance of the app, appropriate user interface and great user experience.

Our research and development constantly update these kits based on anticipated design, UI, UX developments, thus reducing testing cycle times.

Sharing these jumpstart kits with developers helps them comply their app development process with requirements, thus addressing possible challenges at the development stage itself, creating a robust app with all critical issues having been resolved before a formal QA.

Indium also is a certified compliance tester, following the UI standards laid down by different OS, which has been coded in its IP-driven iMobi automation testing framework.

In addition to ensuring compliance, which further boosts user experience, test automation services also ensures early release by shortening the testing process, and resulting in improved customer loyalty and expanding the business.

Indium is supported by a testing lab with a large range of mobile devices to test in real time and has qualified and experienced mobile app testers backed by constant research and development to help the Indium team to capture new and unexpected errors as well as use the best in class testing solutions for optimal results.

Working more as partners in development, Indium through its IP-driven mobile testing framework and experienced testers ensures that both developers and users get the best of the latest developments in the communication and web technology