Mobile Testing: Achieving quality for Android applications

In Play Store, everyday thousands of new apps are being uploaded making it extremely important to concentrate on the quality of the application.

A good quality application is bound to increase user ratings, better rankings in Play Store, and more downloads over longer periods of time. Going by these facts, the testing of Android applications is more complex and time-consuming when compared to the testing of iOS applications.

The Quality of Android app can be achieved when the application is tested on various Android devices with different OS versions, screen sizes and resolutions available in the real world because some applications which work properly on one Android device may create new UI or functionality-related issues on another and customers (end users) tend to use different mobile phone(s). Mobile App development companies can’t guarantee that their applications will work properly on the entire Android devices in the market.

So before initiating the development phase, the product team in the company will have to decide on the compatibility of the application with base devices and base operating system versions and create a list of most-used android phones and tablets with various android versions, screen sizes and resolutions, after a thorough market analysis.

Based on the list of devices, the testing team will ensure the application functionality is consistent across all devices with different OS.

The next major challenge in testing is network testing, and almost all android applications depend on network connection to get user data from the server or to use the network-dependent functionality like sharing on Facebook & Twitter, and email. The QA team will test all client-server communication scenarios to validate the end user experience and the app behaviour under different network conditions (Wi-Fi and 2G/3G/4G networks), through which we can eliminate the network connectivity or performance issues in the initial stage of testing.

To deliver an issue-free app to the market is a challenge, so the testing team also needs to focus on each and every component of the application and make sure the application has no functionality crashes or UI issues before going live.

(Raghuram works as a Senior QA Engineer at [x]cube LABS. A ISTQB certified tester, he has over 3 years of experience in Mobile, Web Application, Performance testing.)