Four mobile testing tools to improve productivity

A buggy app will kill your app store star rating and customer retention. Mobile testing is the answer, but it's time consuming and expensive. Tools are emerging to help solve that problem.

Typically, an organisation must hire manual testers and possibly even automated testers to make sure that an app is free of bugs. In the UK, manual tester salaries typically range from £30,000-£50,000. Automation testers can be £40K-£70K. A small app development agency like Pocketworks may hire 1-3 quality professionals to help ensure an app is always released with minimal bugs.

The reason mobile testing is expensive is because you have to cover all the bases:

• Android and iOS phones because the UK has a 50:50 split right now
• Different screen sizes as not everyone is on big modern phones
• Different operating system versions, lots of people don't have the latest and greatest
• Accessiblity, for when you need to enable 
• Dark mode and light mode, for night time running
• Poor network conditions such as when on a train
• The emerging tools use AI and automation to help speed up the testing process and reduce costs. This means that companies can ship their apps faster and maintain a solid app store rating.

As you can imagine, developing a quality app takes a lot of testing.

The tools below can help reduce the manual labor. The goal is not to replace your testing team, but to give them tools that enable them to be more productive and learn new skills.

Here are four tools that have appeared over the last few years.

Sofy.ai

We use this. It’s a no-code tool that lets non-developers write automated app tests. You write once and then run on many devices and operating systems.

Waldo

This is similar to Sofy. They wouldn’t give me a demo, so I haven’t tried it (WTF!).

mobile.dev

We haven't used it yet, but it appears to be solid. It’s aimed at helping developers save time on automated testing.

Kobiton

We use this too, but only as a device farm for troubleshooting customer problems on particular phones. We had no luck getting the automated testing to work, sadly.

In summary, explore these tools with your quality team and see how you can use them to reduce some of the dog work in mobile testing.

Even if you save 20%, that might be more than enough to justify the spend.

And, you're team will have to learn new skills, which is good for their careers.

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