In this mobile-centric digital world, Android devices have become integral to people’s daily lives. These devices are not limited to just calling or texting, instead, there are several apps installed in these devices that work as individual virtual personal assistants.
This increasing demand for Android apps has put developers under pressure to create a user-friendly, feature-rich, and bug-free mobile app, where automation plays a critical role. To streamline tasks or simply personalize the Android experience to work smarter, not harder, developers choose Android automation to deliver an immersive mobile experience with consistent quality.
This article will provide an in-depth understanding of Android automation, including what it is, and how developers opt for Android automation testing. While discussing that this article will also explore advanced strategies for mobile testing. So let’s get started.
What is Android automation?
Android Automation is a process that verifies all the elements and functionalities of Android apps across various devices, internet connections, and operating systems to ensure efficiency, accuracy, and speed. It entails testing the app to provide a seamless user experience and relevant features, and tick marks all the factors on the checklist including performance, scalability, security, and accessibility.
Android automation testing is done using various Android testing tools. These tools are specialized software and frameworks that help to test the apps on various devices, platforms, and under various situations like bad network connectivity, carriers, and security unexpected crashes and downtime.
These tools record every user action and leave feedback with errors and fixes. Furthermore, it tests for reliability under pressed situations like low internet connectivity, large user load, or network failure.
Why opt for Android automation?
In the process of developing a modern Android app developers must ensure that it works flawlessly on thousands of Android devices with different hardware specifications and operating system versions among other requirements. Below are some of the other reasons why Android automation is needed.
Extreme Android fragmentation- The diversity of Android devices in the market today is one of the major concerns for those seeking to create an Android app. Therefore automating and executing tests for different screen resolutions for mobile as well as desktop devices is important.
Enhanced accuracy- Machines don’t make random mistakes, they are more accurate than humans. In routine, frequent, or repeated work humans are bound to make mistakes if they work on them a thousand times. However, in the case of Android applications, a simple mistake in testing could lead to an error in the functionality related to any action in the application.
Therefore to reduce crashes on the end-user’s device or prevent such events in the future automation is a perfect way. Automated tests strictly adhere to predefined scripts, helping mitigate the risk of human error encountered in manual testing processes.
Need for a scaling application- For smaller scale applications it is easy to perform tests, debug, and maintain manually, however, if the application scales up and the need to test every parameter manual testing becomes repetitive, boring, costly, and error-prone. Because manually testing an app on thousands of Android devices would take enormous time and effort. This is when the need for automated mobile app testing for Android arises.
Fast execution- Manual testing is time-consuming. A complex test requires multiple steps, meaning it will take more time to perform the actions on it. Android automation reduces the time of execution per test and can do repetitive work as many times as possible. It can also execute the tests in parallel to save considerable time.
Faster release- The more time testers will save, the more time they can invest in other testing activities. The more time they get, the quicker they will be able to point out the bugs and report them to the developer, the quicker they will get fixed and the quicker they can merge them into production.
Hence, Android automation directly impacts the release cycles which is one of the major goals of developers and testers. Developers can run tests continuously and provide faster feedback on code changes, accelerating the development process.
Challenges in automated Android app testing
Below are some common challenges that testers encounter while performing mobile testing.
- Device fragmentation
There are millions of Android mobile users worldwide, and each of the devices comes with various models, screen sizes, resolutions, and controls. Not only this device fragmentation it includes a combination of different browsers and operating systems. This poses challenges for development and quality teams to test the app on each of them.
Considering such a wide range of variants, developers would require a standard framework to test the app and ensure its compatibility on most devices. Building a physical hub of popular handsets can be the solution to overcome this hurdle, but building and maintaining such vast infrastructure calls for extensive investment and limited scalability.
Another way out of this is to use a cloud-based testing solution like LambdaTest that allows executing automated tests on any available devices, multiple environments, and browser versions so that testers can achieve more device coverage and efficient testing. Testers can also test their Android apps and websites using Android Emulator Mac online to ensure that all the features of Android apps perform smoothly on Mac.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform where testers can seamlessly test their web and mobile applications both manually and automated at scale. Using the platform, testers can also perform both real-time and automation testing on a cloud of more than 3000 environments, real mobile devices, and browser combinations.
LambdaTest also seamlessly integrates with various automation testing frameworks including Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Puppeteer, Appium, etc, allowing testers to run these tests on any device and browser easily.
It is a thorough quality management platform for mobile testing needs. Its cross-browser, cross-platform, cross-functional test execution and other capabilities help app testers streamline their mobile testing and deliver high-quality applications.
- Updated device model
Besides this device density, challenges also arise from new technologies and updates introduced during the application development life cycle. With the introduction of new features and updates developers need to modify their apps to ensure seamless interaction with the new interface. This practice of updating and testing an app’s new configurations accordingly is a continuous process rather than a set-and-done task.
- Security issues
To protect the app from security issues, the app must have strong encryption because poorly encrypted apps are highly vulnerable to security breaches. Ensuring the app’s complete security over the user’s data is one of the top priorities of developers to avoid risks of personal information leaks or hacker attacks. To ensure all these testers need to perform extensive testing.
- Limits on Emulators
A virtual machine like an emulator can save testers’ day by testing the screen size, user experience, and controls. However, they fail to imitate touchscreen behavior, network connectivity, and battery issues. Additionally, it is limited to emulating the apps in unexpected conditions.
- Writing test scripts
Writing the scripts for Android automation can be time-consuming and may require technical skills. A defective test script can also lead to inaccurate test results. The solution to this is a scriptless testing tool for performing the automation.
- Too many app testing tools
The availability of a wide range of app testing tools can spoil the tester’s choice when it comes to choosing the right tool. Sometimes open-source testing tools can be vulnerable to data leaks. While there are a variety of tools available for various testing needs, choosing a single-point solution can make the application testing process fragmented, leaving holes for data risks and poor performance.
Advanced strategies to streamline mobile testing
A mobile testing strategy is a proper action plan to support app enhancements without sacrificing quality. It helps the test team achieve quality objectives for the application by detecting and fixing any issues before its release. Below are some of the mobile testing strategies implemented which allow the test team to meet user requirements, and provide a high-quality experience.
QA and product team’s involvement in the initial stages of development
Often QA is included in the later stages of the development lifecycle, which compromises the efficacy of the application development process. Instead incorporating QA and testing in the initial stages of the development process before the final design is built and the app is ready provides many benefits, including identification of issues while the app is still in the development phase, improved collaboration among team members, reduced bugs or issues, reduced time to market, seamless and enhanced application quality and performance to its users.
Cross-Platform Testing
Users today have the option to choose among a wide array of devices and operating systems to access the applications and they expect the app to function seamlessly regardless of the operating system version they are using. Therefore, delivering cross-platform compatible apps requires an efficient testing strategy to save time and maintain reasonable testing costs.
In creating an efficient cross-platform testing strategy it is essential to identify the suitable operating systems, devices, and browser versions used by the target and understand business objectives, project requirements, and acceptance criteria. Testers can also utilize emulators with physical device testing to make mobile testing more cost-effective, achieve amazing test results, and deliver flawless performances across diverse platforms.
Automated mobile testing
Automation plays an important role when performing mobile testing. During the life cycle of a mobile app, much new functionality gets added later on, causing new bugs. Automating the testing helps to identify such bugs by reducing the repetitive manual efforts while increasing the speed and scope of the testing process.
Tests can also be run in parallel to identify bugs in different browsers, helping to speed up the results, improve accuracy, and efficiency, and reduce time to market. Additionally, A high level of automation is essential to debug and fix regression bugs instantly, allowing teams to ship quality applications.
Security testing
As mobile devices have become an integral part of people’s lives, security and privacy issues are the key concerns of users today, because they often share their sensitive data like identity information, passwords, location history, and more. Hence no one would want an app that provides a plethora of permission requests as it would leave users’ data vulnerable to threats.
For this reason, executing security testing becomes mandatory to validate the application’s resistance to attacks from malicious users. In deploying effective security testing, the tester needs to implement a robust and well-defined strategy as a base to bridge the security gaps efficiently. While developing a security testing strategy, the tester needs to ensure that the app doesn’t seek any permission that is not used while using the app.
UX and UI testing
Accomplishment in designing excellent mobile applications often relies on its user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). Efficient UI testing enables easy app navigation for all users. It also interprets the consistency, logic, accessibility, and compatibility of the application to find out how the application interacts with the end-users and how quickly users can navigate and explore.
On the other hand, UX testing involves testing elements that need to be resized to scale down according to requirements to interact with the users. The final goal of usability testing is to bring a smooth and intuitive mobile experience by providing a user-friendly and easy-to-navigate app.
Testing across different screen dimensions and specifications
As testers consider testing the apps across different platforms and devices, testing them across multiple dimensions and specifications that come with various devices is equally vital to ensure they look and function well on various screen sizes and resolutions including phones and tablets.
Screen size is a crucial component in the testing process, as it can unfold bugs that negatively affect the app’s layout. Therefore testers must verify that the app’s layout is responsive and adjust suitably across specific dimensions, ensuring that all features work smoothly, regardless of the screen size.
Battery testing
Battery life is a primary concern for mobile users and hence effective mobile app testing must include assessing its impact on a device’s battery. Today, several apps leverage battery-intensive processes, such as posting stories and sharing heavy data, streaming audio and video content, and many more aspects that consume a heavy amount of battery.
In this case, QA testers run multiple battery test features to identify different app activities that drain the battery the most and accordingly eliminate or modify those. By identifying power- elements or inefficiencies, the test team can optimize the app to minimize battery consumption and create a more battery-friendly app, enhancing user satisfaction.
Conclusion
As the mobile app market continues to dominate, automated Android testing is becoming more crucial for developers as it saves time and effort for hard labor-intensive work.
However, automating the Android testing process poses huge pressure on the test team to deliver application quality across different devices. To achieve that, a well-thought-out mobile testing strategy is a must, which requires testers to identify the application’s key functionalities, prepare an extensive set of test cases and scenarios, and choose proper testing tools. Implementing these will help ensure that the app provides the functionality, usability, and performance that users expect.
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