Six Must-Know Performance Testing Criteria for Mobile Applications

In today’s digital world, for every business, mobile applications continue to be the major source of digital connectivity with their customers. Primarily, these mobile apps become vital part and businesses have less than a second’s time to impress users.

Due to this critically limited impression time span, application performance is very essential to ensure your customers get their desired digital experience. With the mobile apps growing at a high rate today, it is critical that all mobile apps should meet the various performance and scalability expectations of consumers. This will further help to gain more app downloads and protect your brand loyalty.

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What Are the End-Users Desires With Respect to Mobile App Performance?

Every mobile app user expects very quick (spontaneous) loading time and good response when they start using it. Slow response times deeply hurt the users and they might even shift to the nearest competitor available. As soon as the user clicks on the app icon, it should load instantly for the user to stay with the app.

In addition, the user interface (UX) is a priority for users like the look and feel of these apps that also catches the eye. Users should feel happy with the app’s load time; the speed with which it performs and its endurance towards scalability. Hence, the app performance matters a lot for users and evidently, businesses should ensure to uphold critical performance criteria through leveraging proper performance testing. Here is a complete guide on performance testing you can follow

Critical Performance Testing Criteria to Derive Flawless Apps

Businesses continue to place their customer satisfaction at the forefront and need to have mobile apps that show great performance. Mobile apps performance primarily showcases how the app is responding with respect to speed, stability, and scalability in real-time. Hence, Performance testing measures the speed, scalability, reliability, and stability of the application when the system is tested for varying user loads.

Mobile apps that go live without sufficient performance testing are bound to bounce back, deliver losses and affect your brand loyalty. Business-critical applications need to be checked for the below performance-related criteria before releasing them into the market.

1. Check out Performance Based on Application Type

The browser-based apps can be directly accessed through the mobile browser and don’t need any additional software to be downloaded or installed on the device. Native apps that are built on a particular platform using a specific software can be directly installed on the device; however hybrid apps having the features of both, usually have an exploratory integrated experience.

In order to test all these apps, testers should build an environment with emulators and real-time devices. Mobile emulators imitate a mobile app or a mobile platform while real-time devices provide a live environment to check out the app's performance.

2. Criss-Cross Server/API Performance

Mobile apps should be checked for the data flow to and from the server and also get an understanding of the underlying application programming interfaces (APIs). This helps to know if there are any downtimes with respect to server efficiency and subsequently work out on improving them.

3. Validate App Performance Under Various Network Conditions

Mobile apps should be checked across network bandwidths for 3G, 4G, and other network conditions for example firewalls, dropouts, network congestion, etc. to keep a vigil on packet loss or any mid-way latency. Further, app performance should also be checked when the user changes from an open network e.g. 3G/4G to a private network e.g. secure WiFi or LAN.

4. Schedule Device Testing to Baseline Performance Variations

Some of the baseline factors that need to be worked out for device testing include checking out app loading time, battery time, and memory consumption variations. Care should be taken to check if there are any hardware and software variations while using the apps on the devices.

5. Verify Apps User Experience (UX)

This specific feature cannot be verified either by a tester or a developer but needs to evaluated by real-time users. Based on various user response times conclusions can be made out. It is preferred to utilize as many external people (i.e. crowd testing) in performance testing and with their effective feedback, a first-hand opinion helps to know about the look and feel of the app.

6. Charter out App Performance Across Various Other Factors

The mobile app should be tested across OS variations, screen sizes, and also across browsers. This ensures how the variations look like when users access it across devices and varied browsers.

Moreover, to ensure performance quality, an effective layered approach should be used to integrate performance testing and load testing to monitor usage patterns under varying load conditions.

Comprehensive Benefits With Performance Tested Mobile Apps

• Improves the user experience with a flawless UX design.

• Ensures app performs seamlessly/flawlessly across devices, OS and networks.

• It helps to improve your brand’s trust with stable apps.

• Optimizes user experience.

• Ensures faster time to market and quicker ROI.

• Ensures to deliver scalable apps to the customers.

• Improves your brand reputation and loyalty.

• Achieve higher ratings from end-users and helps improve app downloads.

Conclusion

Thus, the application needs effective testing methods such as Load testing, Stress testing, Spike testing, Endurance testing, etc. to ensure robust and scalable apps. Mobile application performance testing should be initiated as early as possible in the application development lifecycle. An effective testing approach ensures stable mobile apps that help to improve your business outcomes.