Remember a time when there was only one phone company that handled all of our calls? Maybe not. But there actually was a time when AT&T had a monopoly on all of our country’s phone traffic. When the Justice Department cried foul, AT&T was broken up into smaller regional phone companies. This allowed competition to flourish and consumers benefited by having many different option plans for their phones. The same thing happened with cell phone innovation. Once there were just a handful of cell phone manufacturers that seem to corner the market. Today, there are literally dozens of phone makers providing cell phones in all kinds of shapes and sizes and with all kinds of gadgets and gizmos. The appeal of many cell phones today is with mobile apps. Savvy designers are jumping into the mobile app business in a big way and fortunes are being made every day with the simplest of applications. Can you say angry birds?
If you have a unique idea for a mobile phone application you might find it easier to bring it to the development stage. There are programming and design companies popping up all over the country whose sole purpose is to take your idea and make it a reality. Before that can happen you have to go through a series of mobile application testingin order to make sure your mobile app is ready for the big show.
Another way of referring to mobile application testing is to call it load testing. In other words your mobile app needs to be uploaded to a cell phone platform. The wider variety of platforms that your app can work on increased the chances of selling that application. A mobile application today needs to work across platforms for iPhones, iPods, Android, BlackBerry and iPads devices. That’s a lot of mobile application testing!
Here are some of the factors you need to consider when going through your load testing of the mobile application:
What kind of power consumption is required by the application? If your app causes too much of a drain on the phone because of the power needed to run it then it’s not going to be often used. This same issue applies to the amount of memory and disk space on a phone needed to run the application. How well will your application work with memory cards? Can it adapt to numerous screen resolutions? What type of Internet connectivity is required? Most importantly can this app work with a cell phone that is receiving incoming and out coming calls? These are just some of the experiments that need to be run through the mobile application testing process. You don’t necessarily have to know how to run these tests but you certainly need to know what the results are before you can make your application available to the general public.
A decent company that performs a load test shouldn’t just hand you your scorecard and walk away. They should be in a position to help you improve your application and find ways around any programming challenges. Even the smartest mobile application won’t go far without passing mobile application testing.
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