Beta testing tricks of the mobile app before the big launch
Nowadays, developing a mobile app has become increasingly popular for enterprises. A mobile app dedicated for an enterprise helps customers accomplish a few dedicated tasks swiftly and thus expand business.
But, with over 3.5 million apps on the Play Store and over 2 million apps available on the iOS app store, the competition level is really high.
Thus, when one launches an app, the app has to have a really satisfying functionality. Also, there is no room for minor errors. One needs to make sure that the users do not encounter all the commonly occurring issues in the app. This is how one can make the app to stand out.
An app, goes through several alpha testing rounds while it is being developed. This ensures that the app functionality is flawless. But, to err is human and all the developers are humans. So, there are chances that some minor issues get overlooked by the developers while testing. That is why one needs to conduct a beta testing before launching the app in the market.
The question that arises is - How to beta test the app?
The simple answer - By viewing the app from the user end.
To elaborate the above answer further, you just need to use the app for a few hours and manually conduct all the functionality checks.
Sounds easy, doesn’t it?
Yes, it is.
I have here listed down all the points that one needs to check for loopholes at while testing. The testing can be divided in 2 categories:
Performance:
Obviously the app needs to be at its optimum performance. The basic checks that affirm a satisfying performance of the app are:
Analyse the battery consumption of the app while it is running in foreground as well as background. Make sure that there are no unnecessary connections even when the app is in background.
Check the phone memory space occupied by the app to ensure that it can easily run on phones with low storage spaces. If the app runs out of memory very quickly, there can be out of memory crashes.
Conduct a network analysis to check the data consumption of the app. Sometimes, when the user may keep resending requests to the server, it may result in some serious data consumption levels. The app needs to detect duplicate requests and manage it accordingly. Also background data consumption has to be curbed.
Security:
It is a no brainer that if the user does not get the feeling of data security while using the app, no matter how impressive and efficient the rest of the features are, the app is bound to be abandoned. So before letting the app hit the markets, conduct a security check for these possibilities:
Brute force attack is an automated attempt to guess the user’s username and password by trial and error method. For preventing this, check whether there is a feature that limits the number of login attempts.
App permissions are generally asked by the app to carry out some functions. By reverse engineering, one can check if the app is asking for unnecessary permissions and causing data leakage.
Data leakage should be avoided at all costs. There are several loopholes that hackers can exploit to gain access to sensitive data stored in the app. Check the all the probable points of leakage to be double sure.
Summing up
These checks may not take much time but may save the app from failing in the app market. Beta testing of the app after the app development is complete can prove to be highly beneficial in detecting minor bugs and app crashing issues that drive users away. You may also hire mobile application specialists to do the beta testing of the mobile app.