Mobile automation testing is a fast-paced industry which is bringing constant changes in the mobile application market. The number of smartphone users is rapidly booming each passing day. The phenomenal growth of mobile devices has widened up the chances for the organizations to interact with their customers in the computing environment. Mobile applications have gradually become the primary method of interaction for consumers and businesses.
Nowadays, mobile applications are designed with intelligible functionalities to deliver user-friendly and interactive features. This process of introducing exclusive features in the mobile applications requires impeccable testing strategies. Most of the budding businesses build a roadmap for their startup product development to achieve the end goal, but in terms of testing the product, it requires much more abilities than advanced testing tools.
There are several challenges faced by the app development companies during application testing phase. Many startups are not capable of managing these growing challenges, as manual mobile application testing is different from mobile automation testing. Below are a few key challenges and their solutions that app developers and software testers are generally facing during the mobile automation testing process:
1. OS Fragmentation: With emerging mobile devices, there is always a new update to the mobile operating system also. It gradually creates compatibility issues for the users using multiple mobile applications on their smartphones. Whenever a company launches a new mobile in the market, the chances are there that it will be running on the older OS version. The new OS updates take really long to reach to the end users.
Here, it is recommended for the mobile application developers to develop the app that supports existing OS version which is easily available and majorly used by the smartphone users. And, software testers need to test the application for the same OS versions using emulators and mobile devices. They can even use the combination of internal mobile lab and cloud-based mobile testing services.
2. Network Connectivity: Network connectivity plays an important role in application’s performance. When the user moves from a coverage area from a particular station to another, there would be a temporary loss or change in connectivity. This network factor will directly affect the mobile application’s behaviour and performance. The developer should develop a robust mobile application that is capable of handling such scenarios.
The solution to this problem is that a software tester can consider several situations while testing the mobile app such as how does the app operate offline, what is the impact of different Wi-Fi speeds, connection dropout, low signal strength, etc.
3. Mobile Device’s Physical Characteristics: There are basically three types of mobile applications, i.e. Native, Hybrid and Web application. All these three types of applications differ significantly in terms of speed, performance, usability and compatibility. The native and hybrid mobile apps need to be tested for mobile platform interaction, loading speed, execution, download, and update behaviour. Whereas, the web-applications are more dependent on the browser selection and its version.
The simple solution to avoid this complexity in the mobile automation testing of native, hybrid and web application of supporting multiple mobile architectures is to eliminate the alternatives.
4. Performance, Security, And Usability: In order to give an interactive feel, the developers need to offer the applications on a public cloud with lots of data being stored and shared across several devices. Public clouds have more security issues when compared to a private cloud. The chances of data breaches increase simultaneously while affecting the performance and usability of the application. It is a difficult task to maintain a clean interaction while displaying the necessary information to the user.
It is recommended to provide some serious considerations to the mobile application testing and conduct all possible tests to ensure data privacy. It gradually enhances the usability and helps the testers in identifying the security breaches.
5. UX And Advanced Tools: User Experience (UX) is one of the most important factors when it comes to mobile application development. There are companies who want to offer as many features as possible in the mobile application, thus it ends up creating a less user-friendly app with bad user-experience. The company should focus on the important features that should be offered to the consumers. It helps to avoid stuffing information and enhances the user-experience as well.
Mobile automation testing is emerging and constantly changing with the time. There are several benefits of mobile automation testing and the advanced software testing tools. It reduces the human dependency and manual work pressure.
The mobile-centric applications will eventually affect the performance and usability of the mobile app. Mobile automation testing provides several advanced tools that help in detecting security breaches, enhances the performance on several types of screen size, mobile devices, and OS platforms. It ensures that the mobile app will perform vigorously in all scenarios. 
Ritesh
