Mobile Compatibility Testing — Is Your Armour Updated?

We don’t even need to take a wild guess to know how many hours we spend on our mobile phones. From shopping and ordering food to reading the news and performing quick work tasks — mobile phones are indispensable. Often a poorly designed app/website that’s not fully compatible with our phones can irk us. Enter mobile compatibility testing!

What’s Mobile Compatibility Testing?  

Mobile Compatibility Testing is a test that checks if our software functions the way it’s supposed to across various mobile devices. For any mobile device, hardware and software are built separately. When the software and hardware come together, not all apps function uniformly. This is a predicament because the app’s design and functionality vary across the devices. That’s why we perform a mobile compatibility test where we can check if a certain device’s hardware and software allow the app to function the way it’s intended to work. 

The Significance of Mobile Compatibility Testing

Let’s talk facts — according to Statista, India is projected to have over 760 million smartphone users by 2021, and globally, it’s around 3.8 billion.

And the number of users who browse through phones is naturally increasing by the day. Statcounter reports that more than 76.57% of the Indian population browses websites through mobiles; in fact, desktop web browsers stand staggeringly low at 22.89%. 

If we take a look at GoodFirm’s detailed report on mobile user behaviour, we’ll notice that an average consumer uses 13 mobile apps in a day.

While apps are now a household name, launching them into such a massive market is a lot like launching a rocket into space. We have to run thorough quality checks, gauge what sort of errors they can run into, and more importantly, will they be compatible across thousands of device and browser combinations? 

According to Dot Com Infoway, at least 62% of users uninstall apps if they crash, freeze and if they’re buggy. Adding to that, painfully slow loading time and incompatible design can result in more app uninstallations. Plus, the mobile app market is said to generate global revenue of over 935 billion U.S. dollars by 2023, according to Statista — more reasons to put our energy towards mobile compatibility testing.

Also Read: 4 Steps to Building Your Own Workout Plan App

Things To Keep In Mind While Testing For Mobile Compatibility

While performing a mobile compatibility test, there are a number of factors to consider. At Testsigma, some compatibility issues we’ve noticed are: 

Design Compatibility: 

Different users have different devices, and they browse on different browsers. And all these devices come with different OS, which translates to we’re often dealing with thousands of device-browser-OS combinations, and the app or site will most probably perform differently across all these combinations. 

Sounds scary, doesn’t it? But don’t worry, we’ll get to the good part — Testsigma offers mobile compatibility testing with access to over 2,000 real Android and iOS devices. And the best part? Its automation testing ecosystem provides quick and reliable results. 

Size/Screen Resolution Compatibility: 

With every mobile device comes to a different screen resolution and size. From Statcounter’s statistics on screen resolution, it can be inferred that while most screen resolutions are unknown, 320×640 is the next most-used one. But if we pay close attention, we can see that other screen resolutions are not lagging behind. Other resolutions such as 375×667, 414×896 are still in use. 

Thus it’s essential that we design dynamic fonts for sites and apps that adjust according to the changes in the screen size.

Features Compatibility: 

Some devices and old browsers don’t support all features or apps. To design features that are compatible across various devices and browsers, we have to know what type of browsers, OS, and devices our users own for crafting user-friendly experiences. For instance, if our app’s functionality requires a fingerprint sensor or gravity sensor, and if the devices don’t have these features, the core functionalities of our app won’t be compatible with these devices. This causes a hindrance to a seamless user experience because our users cannot use the apps to their fullest.

Updates Compatibility: 

An important factor to consider while performing a mobile compatibility test — rolling out updates. App updates are important because they introduce new features and fix any security issues. But here’s a hitch: in many cases, older devices and software versions don’t support new features. In order to check if these features are compatible with users’ devices, we perform a compatibility test. When we introduce new updates, we can also set up regression testing to check if the new changes have affected many parts of the app. 

What Testsigma Can Do For Updates?

Testsigma’s automated mobile app testing tool doesn’t just help you test your features but also assists the developers in managing updates with ease. Updates are crucial because they can fix bugs. While running tests, our tool identifies bugs or mobile app tests that have been affected by other changes. Our tool collects screenshots, logs, and videos of the issues and sends out instant feedback — and developers can debug immediately. Our AI engine is also capable of catching affected tests during test failures and fixes most of them automatically. This helps you identify any other potential errors so you can avoid them in the future. Besides, this AI engine keeps the tests up and running, continuously, without causing any changes to the app. 

The Need To Perform Mobile Compatibility Testing On Real Devices

In the real world, users consume products on real devices. Factors like weak network, outdated browsers, operating systems matter and directly affect the product. In short, if we don’t perform mobile compatibility tests on real devices, the tests are incomplete. Also, since our tool sends out real-time notifications via email, Slack, and other communication mediums, the results are immediate and issues can be fixed in a faster environment, in collaboration with the team. This cuts down the number of feedback cycles too.

The home run feature is the flexibility of the tool. While it can be integrated with various project management tools, it offers end to end test coverage. Testers can add different combinations of the input data to test the apps/features. This gives a wider scope to catch any possible errors. 

Testsigma has thousands of device-browser-OS combinations — all you’ve got to do is sign up and start performing mobile compatibility tests.