The Future of Mobile Testing

Everywhere you look today, people are on their phones. Whether they’re using Waze to navigate their Uber riders through the city traffic-free, searching the Pinterest boards for tonight’s dinner inspiration, or button-mashing their way to the high score on the latest game like Flappy Bird or Candy Crush, the usage of mobile devices has found its way into every nook and cranny of our daily lives.

Five years ago, the modern smartphone that we know and love today had just surpassed non-smartphones in sales. It was estimated that this adoption would drive 102 billion app store downloads and a global app revenue of $26 billion. In 2017, the total global number of mobile app downloads surpassed 197 billion with worldwide revenue from app stores reaching $110 billion. This growing usage of mobile devices and apps has driven the demand for mobile app development through the roof.

With more than 2.8 million apps available to Android users and 2.2 million in the Apple App Store, the competition for consumer attention and loyalty is more intense than ever. Slow network connections, a complex navigation, and a hideous UI can be anyone’s downfall. One bug or slow API call can lead to the loss of data, a security breach, and ultimately, the loss of customer trust.

It’s become evident that mobile app development is a key step needed for some companies to stay afloat and it’s more important than ever that businesses invest in mobile testing. Users have basic expectations for the apps they use. Buttons should be clickable. Screens should be scroll-able. Swiping left on Tinder should mean left and not right.

Ease of use, security, performance, speed. These are all words consumers would expect to associate with the mobile apps they use. Any application that doesn’t meet these standards will flounder. Those that innovate beyond this can take the world by storm.

Mobile Apps Today & The Testing Challenges They Pose

When mobile devices came onto the market in the early 1990s they didn’t do much more than make phone calls and send texts with a QWERTY keyboard.

The standard smartphone or tablet today has a touch screen UX and variety of sensors such as GPS sensors and accelerometers that can track and predict the users’ coordinates and the speed they’re going. They can adjust the screen brightness automatically based on ambient conditions, such as if you’re outside or inside or if it’s night. You can use a mobile app to buy anything from airline flights to clothing, deposit a check, or use an app like PillPack to connect with your doctor and access your medical information and prescriptions.

These now-basic capabilities already pose major challenges for QA teams globally. Developers and testers need to account for new gestures like swipes, taps, and scrolls and orientation. The myriad of different devices, screen sizes, and operating systems means that individual platforms have unique capabilities and issues that teams must address.

On the back-end, sensitive data is constantly being accessed and handled. Not only is ensuring personal, medical, and financial data security important, but it’s essential that basic information, like flight times or calendar notifications are accurately portrayed.

App performance is also heavily based on the device type and operating system it sits on. All the while, apps are limited to the storage and processing capabilities of the device itself, along with the battery life. Any app that takes up too much storage or kills the users’ battery risks being deleted.

What Will Mobile Apps Look Like in the Future?

It’s important to look at how much mobile apps have grown to understand how quickly they could continue to grow and what the mobile development and testing landscape will look like in the future. While there are three types of mobile apps today -web, native, and hybrid — and a handful of device types, the developments in the works will quickly make the capabilities of today’s apps look outdated. Here’s what you can expect:

Hybrid and web-based app development and usage will continue to grow. Hybrid applications, or mobile web apps, are easier to develop and maintain. They are built like websites, but behave and feel like a native app. They don’t need to be downloaded from the store. As 4G networks continue to expand, the amount of time it takes for hybrid apps to load will also decrease — making them easier to use for consumers and even more ideal for companies to invest in.

Mobile applications will become more integrated with the physical world. Mobile applications already integrate with other apps as well as physical locations. Device sensors enable apps to be ‘conscious’ to the situation they’re in and utilize the surrounding environment. The most notable app that does this now is Pokemon Go.

Augmented reality is picking up steam, with clothing brands like Zara and TopShop using apps to overlay virtual clothes on customers or models, and sites like Amazon leveraging the tech to help users envision what the products will look like in their home.

Mobile apps will expand beyond traditional operating systems. We’ve already started to see this trend with the development and adoption of smartwatches, VR goggles, and Google Glass. Companies like Magic Leap, a startup developing a wearable device that superimposes 3D imagery over real world objects, has already taken it a step further, and combined a retinal mobile device with the next level of augmented reality. The Netflix app on your phone could move beyond the physical screen you see and touch, to a virtual screen only you can see. Tables with built-in touch screens already exist. So do virtual keyboards. With the direction we’re moving in, who’s to say we’re that far away from the mobile tech portrayed in movies like Iron Man and Black Panther?

The use of biometrics will increase. Apps will integrate with and leverage the human body, not just other tech. While outrageous sounding, many financial and security firms already take advantage of biometrics in their applications. Fingerprint sensors are rapidly becoming a standard feature in phones — most notably for unlocking devices. However, mobile banking apps like that of Bank of America or Chase, have started to leverage this new sensor for banking security. Others apps have been using facial recognition algorithms for years for security or entertainment (i.e., your favorite Snapchat filter).

While these leverage external parts of your body, creative minds have turned their eye inwards. Halo Neuroscience for example, has developed a wearable headset that integrates with a smartphone application to deliver neurostimulation to the users’ brain. The idea behind the tech is that a pattern of electrical wave forms administered to regions on the head and neck can deliver stimulation to specific regions of the brain to enhance cognitive capabilities. You use the app on your phone to determine how much amplitude of electricity you want to receive.

How The Future of Mobile Apps Impacts Testing and Development

So, what will mobile testing look like in the future? You’ll notice that over the course of time, proprietary and groundbreaking advancements in mobile tech have become the norm. Many features that are still in their infancy today, like augmented reality or the use of biometric data, could easily become the standard in the next few years.

As this happens, the use and need for the methods and tools used to get there will also become the standard. Basic mobile testing will move well beyond functional API and UI testing. There will be new security challenges and bugs. To keep pace with the new forms and capabilities of mobile devices QA teams will have to watch out the following advancements.

· Automation, Automation, Automation. According to SmartBear’s 2017 State of Testing Report, 55% of mobile testers are still using manual testing to validate the UI of their applications. While some manual testing will always be necessary, teams will have to automate where it’s practical to do so to stay competitive. With the growth of artificial intelligence, this could mean automating the process of creating automated tests. Any code that can be automatically generated and run must be for cycles to stay short.

· Testing tools and methods will become fragmented. Already, there are a myriad of mobile testing frameworks, UI tools like TestComplete or CrossBrowserTesting, and API testing platforms like ReadyAPI. Each have their own niche capabilities and benefits. As the world continues to innovate mobile devices and the capabilities they offer, tools and practices will have to continue to expand to meet those needs.

· Specialized skills will be required for mobile testers and developers. With new tools, devices, and testing methodologies, comes new types of bugs and new skill sets necessary to find them. Niche testing jobs for biometric and augmented reality apps will crop up. Being able to code and develop these types of apps will become a specialty and those jobs highly coveted.

· UI testing will require a whole new set of objects. How we interact with the user interface of devices will ultimately alter the standard UI objects. Today, these consist of windows (the screen that displays the information), menus, icons, and controls. What happens when the UI of a device isn’t a screen, but rather a 3D virtual object? Think a step beyond Tony Stark or the touch screen Tom Cruise uses in the film Minority Report.

New user interfaces will require new build UIs and object libraries. UI components will expand beyond the generic button and how we interact with them will transcend the mouse pointer.

· Our dependencies on APIs will continue to grow. We live in an API economy. As mobile apps and devices grow, APIs will become even more vital and by default, API testing. Total spending on API endpoint infrastructure and services was estimated to have reached $2 trillion in 2017.

· Security and Visual testing will take precedent. While it’s important to ensure your APIs are returning the right information, it’s also essential that private or sensitive data isn’t being leaked through those API calls. What happens if your fingerprint is stolen?

New mobile devices and abilities pose new threats. When you’re connecting to a device that can alter mental states through electrical stimulation, you’d want to be pretty sure your phone or app can’t be hacked. With the proliferation of malware attacking apps today, security testing will only become more important as devices connect to the wider universe that makes up the internet of things (IoT).

The same can be said for visual testing. The UI of the next device could be rendered in 3D. How will this look overlaid on different objects? How complete is the 3D model?

· Localization testing will become more important. According to Ethnologue: Languages of the World, there are 7,097 languages spoken today, each with their own characters and accents. A sentence in one language could look shorter or longer in others. This poses major challenges for UI testers today as different characters take up a different amount of space. This tends to matter more on mobile apps than desktop or web apps, simply due to the screen size you have to work with. Mobile devices will also read your phone setting for text labels and date formats, so it’s important that as we become a more tightly knit and integrated society, that mobile apps meet the needs of their localized settings.

· Cloud-based mobile testing will continue to grow. Testing on emulators is a popular solution because they replicate both the software and the hardware of the mobile device and are easy to set up. They don’t take battery life or phone storage into consideration however, and setting one up correctly can be time-consuming and expensive. Simulators are less expensive, but don’t simulate the mobile device hardware, which means there are limits to what you can measure.

The optimal solution is to test on real devices, but this is by far the most expensive and nightmarish option. There are 24,000 unique Android devices alone. Added to the vast array of iPhones, iPads, Windows devices or even Blackberrys (god forbid), the task of choosing which ones to test on is impossible.

The good news is, someone has figured it out for you! Companies like CrossBrowserTesting have built a business on maintaining a remote lab with real devices. No maintenance. No hardware breakage. Test on any device or operating system from within your own browser. With the expansion of new platforms like wearable devices, tables, and VR goggles, cross-platform testing will become even more critical. The costs and time reductions associated with cloud-based mobile testing will be irresistible.

Implementing and utilizing a single code base will be essential. While we would expect to see the continued use of web app languages like HTML5 and tools like PhoneGap or Cordova to coincide with the growth of hybrid apps, using a single language for cross-platform development and testing will be critical. Gartner predicts that 20.4 billion ‘connected things’ will be in use worldwide by 2020. With so many platforms, it will become important for QA and development teams to utilize a single code base as much as possible. Write once, deploy everywhere. Platforms like Xamarin are made for this, and we should expect to see the adoption of this and similar tools skyrocket.

The death of the waterfall model is imminent, at least in mobile development and testing. Mobile testing is already a hassle, and the problem is only exacerbated by the growing demands for faster delivery cycles. Get to the market first. Release the next greatest update first. QA teams will have to adopt and implement (effectively) any practices that help them make the leap. When test code no longer needs to be created by hand and can be generated automatically from IDEs, API and UI testing will become a seamless and smooth process. Parallel testing across devices with cloud-based platforms will accelerate any UI based testing and will help teams optimize their apps across the vast universe of devices. Shifting left will no longer be a theory as development and testing will have truly blended.

Mobile devices and the apps we use have drastically evolved over the past few years. We’ve gone from flip phones to smartphones and wearable devices. Mobile testing is still in its infancy and with the mobile device tech that’s on the horizon, it will only become more challenging. It’s important that QA teams today keep in mind just how quickly the market is changing and to keep up, start investing in mobile testing solutions.