Did you know that the average screen time of a smartphone user in the USA is around 4 hours? That’s a lot of time they spend using mobile applications. Here’s another interesting fact. According to research, 79 percent of users abandon the application if it doesn’t meet their performance expectations.
People in today’s fast-paced world are always on the go and demand a flawless experience while utilizing mobile applications. Users want a seamless and trouble-free experience from every app, whether a social media app, gaming, or banking app.
But, as the complexity of mobile applications has grown, maintaining a seamless user experience has become difficult for developers and testers.
This is where effective Performance Testing for the mobile app comes to the rescue of the QA team. It allows developers to identify and fix performance bugs before launching the application in the marketplace.
However, many testers need help with the performance testing process, which is what this article is about, where we will walk you through the process of efficient performance testing for mobile applications.
So let’s get started!
What is Effective Performance Testing?
Effective performance testing is a critical process in software development that guarantees that an application performs optimally under various scenarios. Performance testing examines an application’s speed, stability, and scalability under a specific workload and reveals potential bottlenecks or constraints that can degrade the user experience.
There are various mobile app testing online platforms to conduct effective performance testing. The test scenarios by these testing platforms simulate different network environments, devices, and user activities resembling real-world patterns. It helps the QA team to define clear objectives, create realistic test scenarios, and correctly measure and analyze the findings.
These platforms help the team monitor crucial performance indicators, including response time, throughput, and resource usage. This makes it easier to identify areas where performance may be improved and enables developers to choose optimization strategies based on data.
Mobile App Performance Testing Checklist
Cross Platform Compatibility
Cross-platform testing is essential for effective performance testing for the mobile app. It ensures your application works effortlessly across several platforms or operating systems. For example, an application developed for Windows may also need to run on macOS, Linux, Android, or iOS. In such scenarios, cross-platform compatibility becomes critical to ensure that the application is accessible to maximum users. Developers can achieve cross-platform compatibility using HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, Xamarin, React Native, or Flutter. Cross-platform compatibility helps developers to reduce development time and cost. It also increases their applications’ reach to large audiences by providing a consistent user experience.
Average Load Speed
As it directly affects the user experience, average load speed is a crucial metric in mobile app performance testing. It ensures that the applications load quickly because users demand seamless quick load speeds. According to research, if an app takes longer than three seconds to load, more than 50% of users will give up on it. This may result in a significant decline in user retention, revenue, and engagement. To uncover potential performance bottlenecks, mobile app testing online for average load speed simulates various user scenarios and network circumstances. By examining the average load speed, testers can identify and fix problems like poor server response times, big picture or data files, or inefficient code.
Stress Testing
Stress testing enables developers to monitor whether their application can withstand high volumes of traffic and usage or not, which is necessary to provide a seamless user experience.
It helps determine the application’s weak point by evaluating how effectively it functions under challenging circumstances by simulating high traffic volume, data, or usage. Stress testing reduces churn rates and improves the overall performance and reliability of the application.
Spike Testing
Spike testing, which simulates abrupt and significant changes in workload, is a crucial component of performance testing for the mobile app. It is essential because it might reveal any potential flaws in the infrastructure or programming of the application that could hinder its performance under heavy load.
By performing spike testing, developers can ensure that their mobile app can handle unexpected surges in user activity and maintain optimal performance.
Reliability Testing
Reliability testing focuses on verifying the stability and consistency of the application under different conditions. Mobile app testing online helps to identify faults or errors that can impact the app’s performance over time, such as memory leaks, crashes, or unexpected behavior and enables developers to address them before they become significant problems.
This testing is necessary to guarantee that the mobile application operates dependably throughout time and does not crash or display unexpected behavior.
Conclusion
Performance Testing for mobile apps poses several challenges, including device fragmentation, network simulation, memory limitations, and battery life. Due to these issues, developers may need professional help to ensure their apps run well on various devices and networks.
Thankfully, pCloudy offers a comprehensive solution to these problems. Developers may test their applications on various devices, including iOS, Android, and Windows devices, using pCloudy’s cloud-based mobile app testing platform.
