Top 10 Mobile Testing Challenges

Challenges are normal. What differentiates companies from others is how they deal with those challenges. To help you be ready for the issues that come with mobile testing, I've recorded the one's that I've come across throughout my time in the industry.

If there's one thing that's always changing in the realm of mobile devices, it's the actual pixel density that goes into the wide range of products released year after year. Just glancing through the list of common mobile devices provided by Google's Material.io site, we can already see there are well over a dozen different screen sizes across popular mobile phones to date. Add in tablets and smartwatches, and the idea of developers designing pixel-perfect interfaces becomes a thing of the past.

Instead, developers and designers need to create applications using dynamic elements and layouts. Still, this vast array of screen sizes also requires testers to run the gamut of all possible screen sizes and aspect ratios.

Testing all the various connection types available to modern mobile devices can be yet another challenge for the QA team. Mobile data connection types typically fall into three well-known categories of 3G, 4G, and now 5G, each incrementally providing generational increases to speed and better transmission technology. While we expect 90% of the world's population to have access to at least 4G coverage sometime in 2021, the varying speeds and connection qualities across these generations makes testing a challenge. Even WiFi connectivity can range from as good as a hard-line broadband connection to barely better than a mobile data connection.

For these reasons, it's critical that testing accounts for the full range of speeds and qualities of connectivity the application may experience. Moreover, testing should also acknowledge and measure the application's bandwidth usage, since many carriers and service plans do not allow for unlimited data usage.

New iOS version adoption rates are quite high, with roughly 93% of all iOS devices currently utilizing either version 9.X or 10.X of the software. By comparison, Android users are typically much slower to adopt newer OS versions, with large percentages of users still sticking with versions more than two generations old.

Thus, it is critical that testing accounts for the wide variety of potential (or, at least, likely) operating system versions that users may have installed.

While there are certainly fewer popular browsers in use today on mobile devices than in the past, just as with the fragmentation of operating systems, it's critical to account for the various browsers (and their respective capabilities) when performing testing.

At present, roughly 80% of all mobile devices are utilizing either Chrome or Firefox browsers. Yet, there are four particularly popular browsers and a variety of lesser-used ones to take into account during testing.

While the industry-wide trend is that battery life is on the rise over the past few years, the jump is not as dramatic as most people might expect or hope for. As battery life growth increases at a fairly slow pace, the trend in power consumption from ever-more-demanding applications is trouncing battery growth quite handily. As apps trend towards more demanding needs -- such as higher quality video or more urgent calculations -- the mobile hardware must chug along to keep up, and battery power is drained that much faster.

This means that testing procedures should account for power consumption whenever possible, particularly for highly demanding tasks the application might be capable of.

One of the most critical components of any well-designed and well-tested application is the ability (or inability, as the case may be) for users to easily and accurately interact with the application. This is particularly critical for apps running on mobile devices, which present a fairly small and thus limited amount of screen real estate to display all relevant information properly but provide an easily accessible interface by which the user interacts with the application.

When performing testing for mobile devices' applications, it's critical to examine the size and dimensions of interactive elements and ensure proper legibility of both text and graphical elements the user may need to examine.

Internationalization, or i18n for short, is a development practice that allows the application to be utilized across various languages and cultures. Ideally, proper i18n account for differences in written translations throughout the app and focus on different regional traits, such as locale, timezones, and even canonical equivalences.

Proper i18n testing should evaluate not only proper written translations, but also check for spacing and layouts that need to properly adjust for languages written from left-to-right, right-to-left, and top-to-bottom.

Most modern mobile devices allow access to dozens of device-specific settings: Everything from network connectivity method and airplane mode to screen rotation and location awareness to notification and locale. If you've never taken the time, open up your phone's settings screen right now and count how many unique device settings are available -- you might be surprised at the sheer quantity, most of which you probably never use.

However, the challenge for testers is that any or all of these device settings can (and will) be changed at any time when your particular application is in use, whether it's being launched, closed, or otherwise manipulated in some way.

Another challenge for proper mobile application development is recognizing and handling the location-based information your application might need to utilize, depending on where the user is located. GPS systems are the most frequent user of such modern mobile features, but a wide range of applications now utilize location-dependent algorithms to provide real-time information about the user's surroundings or provide alerts to other users of the same app nearby.

Testers should ensure that any location-dependent functionality is properly tested through simulation tools that emulate changes in location on the device itself or physically take a device to different locations and test the results.

While it may come as no surprise that Android and iOS devices have become the excessively dominant force in the war for mobile users, at roughly 99% combined, other legacy devices are still in use by a good chunk of mobile users, and these devices cannot be ignored by developers nor testers alike.

BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Symbian OS (powering legacy Nokia devices), and even older Android/iOS devices all still remain active by a small, but die-hard percentage of the mobile market. Testing procedures must, therefore, take into account the existence of such devices, particularly when the application in question could feasibly be accessed and run on these legacy devices.

If you'd like to see how crowdtesting can help you deal with these challenges, please feel free to reach out here.