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How to Automate iOS Mobile App Testing?
How can you automate iOS mobile app testing? With a variety of mobile apps available in the app store. There is a huge liability for scaling up the regression testing and mobile app testing efforts. That’s where mobile app testing tools come in place.
People are adopting mobile app testing frameworks early on to focus on automation, performance testing, and various other types of testing as it plays a significant role in app rating and downloads.
This blog will brief you on the key factors to consider in mobile app testing and how to automate iOS mobile app testing.
Key Aspects to Consider for Mobile App Testing
Testing on a particular platform has come up with significant challenges with mobile, and you need to consider some extra parameters. Whether you perform automated testing or manual, in addition to functional testing, your test scenarios should focus on the following:
Operating System
With the number of mobile phones in the market constantly increasing, it’s only feasible to test your device on some of the versions of the Operating System. With iOS, you have extra challenges related to Xcode versions associated with the changes in OS versions.
The UI icons are distinct based on the OS platforms: iOS, Android, and Windows, but when it’s about automation testing, we generally rely on using simulators – the Android mobile app testing takes a long time to load as compared to faster-working iOS devices.
Connectivity
It is necessary to tell what happens if bandwidth changes and what happens if a customer is leveraging their mobile device offline or in flight mode to make sure that the app is working correctly.
Screen Sizes
While developing a mobile application, some prime factors should be considered for distinct versions of OS in addition to landscape or portrait mode on different device types:
Device Screen Size Full size tablets 8.5 inch or larger Small tablets 7-8.5 inches Tablets 5-7 inches Medium mobile devices 3.5-5 inches Small mobile devices 3.5 inch or smaller
Location
For mobile apps that rely on location-based or GPS services, testing should be performed by imitating location with the help of some tools, including Location Spoofer, MobileSpy, etc., or else it would become a challenge to validate the performance.
For instance: If you wish to imitate a test case for a grocery delivery mobile app, where someone is requesting delivery from NYC, and there’ve been improvisations made to the backend services related to finding a delivery boy in that specific location. The tests will provide you with accurate results during simulation.
How to Automate iOS Mobile App Testing?
While performing manual testing, there are a plethora of test cases that require attention. Most companies that develop iOS applications precisely tell which OS versions are supported. This is helpful to restrict our testing efforts to the limited OS versions and save time.
To rate your app testing efforts, we are required to invest in automation. There are a lot of popular frameworks that support iOS automated mobile app testing, like XCTest, Espresso, EarlGrey, Calabash, etc. But for now, we will discuss the two automation tools Appium and Espresso.
| Espresso | Appium |
| Uses Kotlin & Java for test creation. | Uses Python & Java for test creation. |
| Native open-source framework. | Free to use any testing framework. |
| Only supports Kotlin & Java. | Supports programming languages like objective C, Java, JavaScript, and Ruby. |
| It tests only iOS apps. | It tests cross platform apps like iOS, Android, and Windows apps. |
| Explicit waits, that apply a condition. | Implicit waits, which include use of sleep, making the tests flaky. |
Online Mobile App Testing Tools
There are several mobile app testing tools available in the industry, and how to choose them depends on these factors:
- Mention the purpose of automation
- Team skill-set
- Testers/Engineers/Managers/Developers/Sales preference
- Number of hybrid applications
- Compatibility of native source code and test framework
- The audience for automation should be the product
- Compatible across all devices
- Wide localization
- Impressive performance
- Stable network bandwidth
Mobile App Performance Testing
While undergoing mobile application testing, instead of concentrating on automation to accelerate testing efforts, we should prioritize performance testing because it plays a significant role in determining whether a customer will continue using our app.
Users become restless if the device requires more than 2 seconds to load. As a result, they go back. So, we need to invest our time, effort, and money in performance testing to retain our users.
While performance app testing, we need to verify the benchmarks band Key Performance Indicators against their:
- Average response time
- Average throughput
- Maximum response time
- The peak number of users for each device
If you use a mobile application testing tool, you can make performance testing easier. For instance: Appium can keep track of end-user performance; it gives perfect collective reports for every key performance aspect.
To examine the performance of the mobile app, we can consider leveraging Firebase Performance check, which offers complete control over the data by sharing the information about – how your application performs with the downfall of the network and tracing data into parameters including country, network type, device, and application version.
To sum up
In all, this guide has offered you with – how to automate mobile app testing, the benefit of iOS mobile app testing, and the way to overcome challenges that come along with app testing! We hope these few pointers will help you accelerate your app testing efforts and enhance your test experience. Happy Testing!