The Pragmatic Tester

When you are testing mobile apps there are a number of non functional elements you need to consider (that do not apply to website testing) such as push notifications, device network issues, location services and app installation. In this post I'll cover these and explain how to test these areas. Push notifications Push notifications were pioneered by Apple in 2008 and this technology was subsequently adopted by Google for its Android OS and by Microsoft for its Windows Phone OS. Push notifications allow an app to deliver information   to a mobile device   without a specific request from the app. This means that the app does not need to be launched for the mobile device to get the push notification. Each operating system has their own Push Notification Service. On iOS it's called Apple Push Notification Service (APNs) and Android had Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) but this has been superseded by Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). Note that FCM can also be used to send push n...

In this post I'll describe how to access files and databases associated with a mobile app. On the apps that I test we have log files and SQLite databases that are useful to look at when investigating potential bugs. How do you access files and databases on a mobile device? As usual that depends on whether you are testing iOS or Android. App specific files are available on both devices but they way you access them is different for each OS. iOS For Apple devices, you can use iTunes to access app specific files. Open iTunes on your PC or Mac and connect your device. You will see the device: Select the device icon. This will open the apps page. Under File Sharing you can then select your app to view its associated files. You can then add files, save files to your PC or delete files on the device. Android On Android devices there is usually a folder called "MyFiles". App specific files are stored under that folder. To access them, ...

In this post I'll describe how to actually get test versions of the app onto a device. But first let's discuss whether you should test on an actual device or on an emulator. An emulator is a desktop application that mimics the hardware and OS of a mobile device. The developers will generally do their app development on an emulator and you can use them for early stage testing but when it comes to meaningful end to end testing, a device is a must have. There is no other way to get a feel for the performance of the app and how users will use it real life. Of course you will probably need to test on multiple devices as they vary not only by OS (iOS and Android) but also OS version, device make (e.g. Samsung or Motorola), and screen size. We also now have a new OS for iPads called iPadOS. In a future blog post I'll look at device fragmentation and how to handle it. For now let's assume you are only testing on one iOS device and one Android device. Your developers h...

You all no doubt own a mobile phone, most likely an iOS or Android device, so you probably think it wouldn't be too difficult to test mobile apps. While the principles of testing remain the same, there are significant differences between how you test websites and mobile apps. For example: You can't just open a browser on your laptop to test the latest version of the application. Somehow you need to get the latest version of the app onto your test device. iOS and Android have completely different design patterns. It's more difficult to get under the hood of an app to see what's going on. You can't just open Chrome DevTools. This is the first in a series of posts where I'll give you some background on how to test mobile apps and include a number of tips and tricks that I've learnt the hard way in my 10 years of mobile testing experience. I'll focus on iOS and Android since those are the most common apps but I also test...