Mobile app testing is the process of testing mobile applications for usability, performance, functionality, and stability. It is done manually or using automation.
You must perform mobile app testing before releasing an app to ensure it functions appropriately throughout the customer journey. Doing this can improve the app’s functionality and overall quality, along with its security and user engagement.
Testing a mobile application benefits you in many ways:
- Detecting bugs or errors saves you from additional costs that may incur
- It helps minimize the risks associated with releasing a broken or poor performing app that could frustrate the users
- App testing protects your brand reputation by releasing only high-quality apps
As a result, you can earn better reviews and higher app installation rates to increase your customer engagement and ROI.
Mobile testing is an essential factor in building a high-quality mobile application. In this article, I’ll be discussing some of the best mobile testing tools that will let you build an app that users would download and use regularly.
HeadSpin
HeadSpin‘s omnichannel digital experience testing platform enables enterprises to optimize application performance globally. With real devices worldwide, the Platform supports manual and automated app testing, facilitating proactive performance improvement and confident app launches.
Advanced AI-Driven Analytics and Insights: Using advanced AI and machine learning algorithms, the HeadSpin Platform analyzes performance data to provide deep insights into application performance. It prioritizes issues based on user experience impact, enhancing resource efficiency and speeding up issue resolution.
Comprehensive Global Device and Network Coverage: HeadSpin offers access to a wide range of real devices, browsers, and networks across 90+ locations worldwide. This extensive coverage helps enterprises detect and resolve location-specific issues, improving user experience across international markets.
Seamless Integration and Collaboration: The Platform seamlessly integrates with popular development, testing, and monitoring tools such as Appium, Selenium, Jenkins, and JIRA. This streamlines workflows and promotes collaboration among different teams, facilitating rapid issue resolution.
Industry-Specific Solutions: Tailored solutions cater to the unique needs of industries such as e-commerce, media, finance, travel, and gaming. These solutions address industry-specific challenges, ensuring seamless user experiences and optimized content delivery.
Customized Support and Continuous Improvement: HeadSpin’s expert support team collaborates closely with customers to customize the platform to their specific needs. This personalized approach ensures maximum benefits from the platform and continuous optimization of app performance based on insights gained from comprehensive testing capabilities.
TestGrid
TestGrid is a cross-platform mobile application testing platform that helps software testers and quality engineers to automate the mobile app testing process.
The platform allows users to perform both manual and automated testing of their mobile applications on real devices hosted on the cloud or on your premises in the easiest way.
Start with a free plan and upgrade at as low as $39/mo.
Features:
- Start low, scale anytime
- Scriptless mobile app automation testing that can generate downloadable Appium,
- XCUITest code.
- AI-based no-code automation
- Performance testing to help you optimize & improve your app
- Reuse wrote test cases on multiple apps.
- Test in parallel for faster test execution and go to market launch
- Available as both on-cloud and on-premise.
- Integrate with your favorite CI/CD tool for continuous testing
Katalon
Build sustainable mobile applications by testing them with Katalon and stand out in the crowd. This mobile testing software is bundled with essential components and keywords that will help you kickstart mobile automation tasks quickly.
Get the benefit of the active and rich Appium-based ecosystem that supports the latest devices and mobile platforms. It has the power of object spying to identify and store UI elements and accelerate the scripting process to reduce maintenance challenges.
Katalon can generate tests effortlessly with a mobile recorder and maximizes automation efficiency through scripts and reusable test objects across web, mobile platforms, and API. You will also find cross-environment test execution with actual simulators, devices, or cloud-based devices, both remotely and locally.
Katalon integrates with platforms like LambdaTest, Sauce Labs, and more. It supports Linux, macOS, and Windows and allows you to test hybrid and native apps.
Start with a flexible plan by choosing the number of projects and team size starting at $839/license per year. You can also go for a FREE plan as per your need
LambdaTest
Perform online cross-browser testing of your apps on the latest Android browser emulators and mobile iOS simulators with LambdaTest. It allows you to create your custom devices to view websites on multiple resolutions and different devices.
Run tests on your desktop and mobile simultaneously, debug, and share the reports instantly. You can use the iPhone simulator for all the automated and manual browser testing in the place of expensive in-house device labs.
With LambdaTest Tunnel, test your privately and locally hosted browsers as well. Using LambdaTest online Selenium Automation Grid, you will be able to develop, test, and make delivery faster with automated testing. You can also perform tests on Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome in various browsers to ensure cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.
Debug the mobile pages with the in-house developer tools and get access to browser developer tools. You can communicate with users about the bug through Asana, Trello, JIRA, or move to Gitlab, Github, Slack, etc., directly from LambdaTest. Run test for geo-blocking, geo localization, geo-targeting across 27+ countries, including Japan, India, United States, Germany, Canada, Australia, UK, and more.
Choose any plan according to your testing requirement at a starting price of $15/month. You can also opt for a lifetime free version.
Testsigma
Testsigma is an AI-driven test automation tool to run tests on mobile applications for insightful results. This app helps you check your software applications’ usability, consistency, and compatibility in the current development scenario.
With an intuitive dashboard, you can focus on critical indicators for your project that drives your business. View recent run details, latest activities, and be ready for scheduled executions. Testsigma is a single platform that helps you avoid using multiple tools as it houses many capabilities.
You can plan for testing your Android application, web application, iOS application, Android Native application, iOS Native application, and web services. In addition, you can manage the users according to their roles and assign them projects.
Testsigma allows you to create your artifacts like test case types, test case priorities, and requirement categories. You can also run tests parallelly to reduce the time of execution by many folds. Start grouping the tests and run them across operating systems, devices, and browsers.
Testsigma enables simple automation for mobile (both iOS and Android), API test, and desktop without any configuration or installation overhead. It also helps you in using responsive UI for writing automated tests faster. Testsigma provides you with context-driven and dynamic reports that will help in understanding the results of the tests better.
By using powerful filters, you can analyze the information to create a custom report. You can check productivity, the progress of your test developments, and user activity and take necessary actions to enhance productivity and resource utilization when required. You can also integrate it with other tools to perform continuous testing and other benefits.
The price for test executions starts from $249/month, allowing you to sign up for free.
Perfecto
Perfecto is a secure, sophisticated, and scalable mobile testing tool. Test on emulators/simulators and real devices without any hassle of maintenance of the devices. You will get enterprise-grade security and can scale to 10k test executions per day.
Automate the advanced capabilities and use cases to apply user simulation for accurate testing. Find the bugs and fix them faster with failure analysis. You will get heatmaps, dashboards, and detailed artifacts, including screenshots, crash logs, vitals, and videos.
Boost your test coverage with the supported browsers and devices you need to test over the cloud, same-day access for the new releases. Perfecto integrates with many test frameworks like XCUITest and Appium to CI tools such as Jira and Jenkins for test management.
You can speed up the delivery process with parallel testing, bursting, and velocity for large suits. Perfecto has test creation choices for all the skill levels, including Quantum BDD framework or code-based.
The price starts from $83/month by giving you an option for a FREE trial.
Kobiton
Kobiton allows you to experience seamless mobile testing with every release. Prevent the problems before checking your code and run tests on the devices. You will find automated testing, manual testing, and scriptless automation solutions for delivering releases faster.
Resolve failures by pinpointing efficiency and accuracy and instantly zoom in on the test failure with Session Explorer. Kobiton integrates with CI/CD tools for continuous testing and release at speed. Release even quicker with regression tests and performance metrics.
Run tests on real devices with Kobiton’s mobile testing tool and get the most accurate results by testing web and mobile applications on Android and iOS devices. Kobiton’s device lab management software helps you in creating perfect tests for mobile applications.
Create automated scripts for mobile tests easily from the manual test sessions and execute them simultaneously on many devices. If you prefer scripting, you will get support for Selenium, XCUI, Appium, Espresso, etc. Enjoy features like capturing full tests with complete logs, securing connections, parallel execution of the scripts, abandoning the lower app, accelerating app delivery, etc.
Choose a plan starting from $50/month and avail of the FREE trial benefit.
Appium
If you are looking for an open-source test automation project that you can use to test mobile web, hybrid, and native apps, Appium is a good option. It is built on the concept of testing native apps without recompiling or SDKing your app.
Appium aims to automate mobile apps from test networks and languages, with full access to DBs and back-end APIs from test code. You can write tests through dev tools using programming languages like Python, JavaScript, Java, PHP, and many more.
It supports devices like iOS (Mac OSX, XCode w/Command Line Tools) and Android (Mac OSX or Windows or Linux, Android SDK>16). It enables you to write and set up a test for your mobile app with an easy configuration process.
Download zip files for Mac and Windows set up on your device quickly to start using Appium and running tests on applications to see the accurate result in front of you.
Apptim
Apptim makes mobile app testing easier and incredibly faster to learn the performance issues in each build. It offers a powerful dashboard for your team, which helps measure render times of the app, power consumption, capture crashes, resource usage of the device, and more on iOS and Android devices.
You can run tests and share reports to the private workspace of your team or save them for discussion with the members later. After doing some tests, you can compare them to get an accurate solution. Integrate with CI pipeline seamlessly to use Apptim with existing automated or manual tests, and start catching the performance issues before going live instead of fixing them in production.
You can test the performance of the new code, every build app, every deployment, and production. Apptim offers a user-friendly interface to let anyone in the team use it easily. It helps you capture the nitty-gritty of your apps, which will be helpful for developers to pour-over.
Don’t worry about changing the app’s code or installing the heavy SDKs. Instead, test your app’s performance with less effort, quickly troubleshoot application exceptions and crashes, discover critical bugs in the app, improve application experience, and release every new version with confidence.
Compare paid and free plans and choose your desired plan starting from $159/month.
Tricentis Testim
Tricentist Testim is an AI-Powered test automation framework for mobile applications.You can create codeless tests that are powered by community addons, adaptive wait, and self-healing.
TestProject will handle setup, orchestration, and maintenance and gives you the benefit of automatic test deployment, seamless integrations, and remote execution with your favorite tools. You can also build CI/CD pipelines with integrated CLI for the local test execution and HTML report generation, including screenshots.
Get your test results in a centralized dashboard and view insights about the release’s quality and detailed report with logs and screenshots, including BDD-ready report and live documentation.
Without cloud footprints, you can create tests locally, which provides you the ultimate experience for offline debugging. You can also save your tests on the machine for version management, complete offline execution, and backup.
Create your free account to download this automated tool and test your app.
BitBar
BitBar is a flexible mobile app testing tool that works on any framework, project scale, and device. It presents before you an efficient mobile device cloud having many real iOS and Android devices. You will also get a comprehensive test coverage supporting 200+ device models, and the software helps you boost your test efficiency to achieve regular testing.
You can quickly bring VM or Docker-contained frameworks and test your apps locally over the mobile device cloud. Control the devices remotely with gestures to perform troubleshooting issues, exploratory tests, and debug.
BitBar is different from other tools concerning zero-configuration, the maximum parallel tests, stable and faster tests, and monitoring tests. You can easily configure mobile test and development environments and speed up adopting and evaluating the latest technologies.
Set proper device access using SSH/VPN tunneling and control authentication via SSO. You can also perform lots of other operations like resetting device connections, monitoring their performance, setting priorities for the test, and scheduling cleanup procedures for devices. Moreover, all these functionalities are available in the clean admin dashboard with queue visibility.
Start your mobile app testing with BitBar in seconds for FREE without giving any credit card details. Or, you can choose an unlimited testing plan that starts from $29/month if billed annually.
Why is mobile app testing that important?
Mobile app testing is important because of the high levels of usage of mobile apps. We use mobile apps for ordering stuff online, food delivery, banking, investment, traveling, entertainment, communication, social media, work-related apps, fitness, productivity, and whatnot.
According to a report, global expenditure on mobile applications reached around $29.3 billion in 2020. So, you see, the whole world is loving mobile apps just like you do. They make our lives easier with just a few taps. And hence, mobile app development is skyrocketing.
Reliability of an app is a critical factor to ensure people use your app regularly. Buggy apps with unfriendly UI can drive users to competitors. Nobody wants to wait while your app keeps on circling, and people might quit using it altogether if they encounter a poor user experience.
Now, you can think about what types of mobile apps you’d love to use – the ones that run smoothly and are responsive or the ones that keep on crashing and lagging?
“Of course, the first one,” you’d say.
This is why developers and organizations need to ensure their mobile applications provide a seamless user experience by offering fast performance, responsiveness, and clean design. The only way to ensure your app ticks all the boxes is by performing mobile app testing.
Types of Mobile 📱 App Testing
There are different types of mobile app testing, including:
- Functional testing: This test determines how your application is working based on your business needs. It checks whether or not the links perform properly and data exchange is smooth.
- Performance testing: It tests app performance in various cases, such as how it performs in low battery and/or memory, poor Wi-Fi connections, etc.
- Usability Testing: It focuses on the entire UX experience, like whether the app is easy to use or not, how user-friendly it is, the design is cool or overwhelming, etc.
- Security testing: It is done to verify whether app data is secure or not and avoid vulnerabilities to protect it from threats related to data and privacy.
- Load testing: It checks how much user traffic the app can handle at a time. For this, you can check for metrics like response times, transaction errors, network or server usage, etc.
- Compatibility testing: It verifies the app performance and functionality on several mobile devices and platforms such as tablets and smartphones and iOS and Android platforms.
Apart from these, there are other types of testing such as interrupt testing, regression testing, operational testing, installation testing, and interface testing.
Factors to Consider When Selecting a Mobile Testing Tool for Your App
Here are some essential features you should consider before choosing your preferred mobile app testing tool.
- Cross-Platform Support: Should be able to help with different devices and systems.
- Ease of Use: Simplify the testing process and make it easier to learn.
- Performance Testing: It should be able to examine how the app performs in different scenarios.
- Reporting & Analytic: Assess reporting quality and use analytics for issue identification.
- Security Testing: Aims to confirm the security of app data, preventing vulnerabilities and safeguarding against data and privacy threats.
- Reusability: It should offer script reusability to save the teams’ time and effort.
- Tool’s Pricing Model: Consider tool costs and ensure they fit the enterprise budget.
- Community and User Reviews: Review feedback from developers for insights on the tool’s pros and cons.
FAQs
Yes, various tools can simulate real-world scenarios like network conditions, battery levels, device orientations, etc. This is very helpful in assessing the application’s performance in multiple situations.
Efficient mobile testing tool use involves clear objectives, diverse testing, real devices and emulators, balanced automation, reusable scripts, seamless CI integration, realistic scenarios, stress and security assessment, user feedback, ongoing monitoring, updates, team collaboration, documentation, and training. Prioritize user experience at every step.