Do We Test Mobile Applications Really

The digital market at present is at its peak where a large amount of development are being targeted on mobile devices. There is a critical complexity on this where there area various platforms, operating system, vendors etc and as a Software company must target on quality of delivery fulfilling all the criteria's in the market.

As we all know if our app doesn't fulfill end users immediately, their is a possibility that they will uninstall it from the PlayStore/AppStore and switch to an alternate solution within a few seconds. So it becomes very easy for a lesser quality application to fall through the cracks.

To overcome this risk of the application which drives customers away as well as failing it is essential to perform adequate testing on the applications.

A tester when tests an application tests in a machine either windows/mac/linux but when the requirement is particularly mentioned for mobile devices or applications he/she fails to test on real devices instead tests on his/her PC using Emulators.

Emulators are really a good starting point for testing an application and particularly helpful in development stages or reproducing scenarios. We all know this is very cheap and easy to access. My fear here is with these features emulators will become a substitute for testing on real devices.

Let us see the benefits of testing on real devices.

Benefits of Testing on Real devices

1. We can get the actual results visually without worrying about any “false positives” or “false negatives”.
   
   
2. We can understand the real-world impact on device memory and how well it behaves with other apps installed in the memory allocated.
   
   
3. The major point is the app performance, we cannot say that app which works well with wifi will be same with the mobile data.
   
   
4. Live user interface and rendering of pages, dates, etc.
   
   
5. Easy feedback can be concluded on the app whether it is user-friendly or other changes needed.
   
   
6. With the live environment and real life scenarios we can measure the performance.

Challenges needed to be measured on Testing on Real devices

Statistics

Everyone around us cannot have the same views, similarly what devices should an application be tested on ? The developer will have a view, management will have a view, tester will have a view. So we need to prioritize the devices which will target audience at present and near future. From this we need to conclude on operating system, OS version and screen size.

Similarly there are other factors such as cost of the devices, cellular data, etc which must be managed properly with the resources allocated.

Conclusion

We should never conclude that an application which works on an emulator will work with real devices. Emulator should never be replaced with real devices.

If we need far more reliable test results, performance, true user experience, proper interoperability then testing real device is 100 % needed. Always quality is key to success and to ensure quality we must test it with real devices.