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Performance Testing is Essential for Mobile Apps

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Performance Testing is Essential for Mobile Appa

Performance testing is a method that assists in determining how well an application performs under specific workload conditions. It focuses on non-functional characteristics and enables us to determine how well an application will perform under high-volume user activities. It also enables us to evaluate speed, reliability, and competence.

As an application tester, you may use either a white box or a black box technique to do performance software testing services. When used as a white-box approach, it enables you to observe the execution of the code and identify areas for improvement. When utilized in a black-box method, it allows for the simulation of the users and transactions that will support and the time required for the application to respond.

What is a Mobile Application?

Mobile apps are a collection of pre-set functions optimized for mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, and other feature phones. Not all mobile apps are the same; three distinct categories of mobile applications are classified according to the technology used to build them.

Types of Mobile Application

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  • Native Mobile Application

Native Mobile Applications are those that operate natively on your Smartphones or Tablets; they run on the mobile device’s operating system. They deliver exceptional performance while also being extremely reliable. Additionally, this kind of application can access other applications on your smartphone devices, such as photos and your address book.

In the mobile application store, native applications are available. There is a play store for Android and an iTunes store for iPhone. As a result, these applications are downloaded and installed on mobile devices via their respective stores.

  • Web-Based and Mobile Applications

Web-Based Mobile Applications are not installed on the mobile device; they operate directly from the browser.

Hybrid Applications: Hybrid application is similar to Native apps and runs in the native container, is a mix of both applications and uses the device browser rather than the actual browser to generate the applications web pages.

  • Approach to Mobile Application Performance Testing

Performance testing for mobile applications is distinct from performance testing for web applications. Poor network conditions, such as packet loss or delay, have little effect on the laptops or desktops used to access online applications.

Whereas in mobile apps, network conditions, packet loss, latency, the sort of device we use, such as a smartphone or smart device, and bandwidth are all important, we should not ignore any of these factors when considering mobile application performance testing.

Before developing a performance strategy, it’s critical to identify the application running on your mobile device.

Types of Performance Testing

Load Testing

The load testing approach determines how an application behaves under typical and predicted peak load circumstances in a production environment. This approach determines whether an application fulfills its performance requirements and focuses on response times, rates, and breaking.

Advantages:

  • Detects problems with functionality or concurrency that occur when the system is under load.
  • Determine the accuracy of the hardware environment required to run the application.
  • Determine the maximum number of users and the maximum load before the application’s performance is compromised

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Stress Test

The stress testing approach used to determine which conditions will fail in an application. This approach intended to identify bugs that only occur in extreme load conditions. Through stress testing, memory leaks, race situations, and synchronization issues can identify. Additionally, it is critical to determine the application’s ability to recover quickly from an adverse event.

Advantages:

  • Determine if the data utilized will get corrupted if the application fails.
  • Determine the maximum load that can support before a failure occurs or the speed slows.
  • Enables you to determine where the monitoring triggers can identify to warn of a compromise in application performance.
  • Determine what steps should be taken to redirect risks

Testing of capacity

The method of capacity testing is linked to stress testing, and It tries to determine how many users and transactions are supported before a failure occurs. This approach is used to plan how an application capacity may rise and ensure the correct operation while increasing users and transactions.

Advantages

  • Determine how workloads are redirected to ensure the application meets business requirements.
  •  Detect the real use and capacity and how much they may increase.
  • Conduct a multiple comparison test to evaluate capacity planning models and predictions

For every application running on a mobile device, two primary factors affect the end user’s performance:

1.   Mobile Device Request:

This method delivers the request to the server and generates the server response based on the request received. Once the server generates a response, it sends it back to the mobile device that made the initial request.

The criteria that must consider in this case are the server load, the various network kinds (3G, 4G, etc. ), the load on each network, and any other components.

We may utilize emulators for testing, i.e., create the scripts and use emulators to mimic the user load on the server.

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2.   Mobile Device Page Rendering:

Mobile page rendering is nothing but the response received from the server to the request that we have sent from the mobile application.

The operating system of the device, the configuration settings of the mobile device, and so on are the parameters that must be checked in this situation. We may test these by physically logging into and monitoring the mobile device.

Reasons why measuring the performance of mobile applications is critical:

  • Users anticipate their applications to launch in approximately two seconds, according to Compuware research. Google’s SEO reports confirmed it, which list site speed as a critical factor in Page ranking

Mobility teams must realize that customers expect their applications to react in less than two seconds. Anything longer than two seconds might lead to your business loss. Once the app begins to take longer than five or ten seconds, people start moving to your rivals. 

  • Mobile App Error Rates are almost certainly considerably greater than they appear: You’ve surely encountered difficulties such as images not loading, network failures, content feeds leaving blank spaces in the app, timeouts, crashes, freezing, and upload failure. The majority of these difficulties are not caused by application errors but by unstable networks

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The error rate is very changeable and depends on the network status. In the United States, error rates are generally under 3%, but in India, China, and on challenging networks in Europe and Asia, error rates can be frustrating at 12%. Failure to measure and manage mobile app problems can lead to unhappy consumers, uninstalls, and 1-star reviews in app stores. And nobody wishes for that.

  • 5-star app rating: Reviews and ratings have become critical factors in determining whether or not a user would download your app. And the app should be perfect in every manner to earn a five-star rating

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Suppose you focus on functional testing and ignore the performance of your mobile app, not knowing whether it is draining too much battery on a particular device or consuming too much data. In that case, your Playstore may flood with bad reviews even before you market it well.

Tips for monitoring app performance

Performance monitoring must consider certain factors to enhance the user experience. These include evaluating performance, stability, and resource consumption in real-time from the user’s perspective, i.e., how they perceive them.

The context is also critical. It’s critical to determine the number of people affected by slowness and what activity on a particular operating system caused the interruption. To have a mobile moment,’ you should keep the following points in mind when evaluating your app’s performance:

Measure the time required to render a frame

Measuring network time alone is insufficient for users who care about both the network’s resume and response times.

Measuring response time per device or operating system enables the product manager to concentrate on a single platform at a time, resolve performance concerns, and deploy resources appropriately.

  • Measure battery consumptio

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It is critical to monitor your mobile app’s battery consumption, as well as its influence on your data plan and memory use. If your battery drained by the app, you should bring it into line with the best practice. Additionally, frequent changes might minimize user satisfaction.

·         Measure the amount of data used by cells

Recent studies by Dimensional Research have indicated that 20% of users stopped using high-data-use apps. It shows that you should measure the use by application version, the overall number of users, KBs of data consumed each minute, the quantity of data sent per hit and the percentage of information consumed per hit.

  • Errors in measuring

HTTP errors from certain URLs must be captured. It enables tracking the number of users who encountered an error, the actions that caused the error, the number of users who encountered errors during app launch, the proportion of activities resulting in at least one error, and the app version.

Conclusion

Due to the huge volume of applications on the market, it’s more challenging to earn consumers’ trust. Thus, functional considerations should include during development, but consumers should also perceive other qualities that make them happy when using the application.

One element is the application’s performance under normal load conditions. Performance testing is the most effective method for determining how an application will behave in real-world situations and avoiding failures.