Mobile App Testing

One of the biggest challenges in creating a mobile app – perhaps the greatest challenge in fact – is optimizing functionality across a plethora of devices and operating systems. One day, your functioning iPhone app explodes in popularity. The next day, angry masses are littering your blog with angry comments about how it doesn’t work on Android. We’ve seen this before.

The latest example involves the Angry Birds application, which as it turns out, is not fully supported on several Android phones (and won’t be according to their blog). That said, the dev team is hard at work testing a number of performance related issues. Here’s their statement:

From the beginning, we have wanted to make Angry Birds available for every feasible Android device. This is why we chose to distribute the game via GetJar, and why the game is supported by advertising. We tested the game extensively on a large number of devices, and gathered all the feedback we received from our beta testing to address every possible issue.

So far, we have hesitated to create multiple versions of Angry Birds for the Android platform. But judging by the feedback we have received, we feel that by providing a lightweight solution, we are doing a favour for our fans.

We are currently developing a lighter solution to run Angry Birds on lower end Android devices. This does not mean lighter gameplay or a lesser amount of levels, but a game experience optimized for devices with less processing power.

At the moment, however, the following devices are still out of luck:

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Note to hackers: Set up a Google Alert for “mobile payment bugs”, wait for companies to announce serious flaws in their payment apps, and then proceed to steal their customers’ info and money.

Kidding of course, but with stories like this, you start to realize that mobile app testing is still far behind its web testing counterparts – especially in the ever critical realm of mobile payments. Expect this to be a recurring problem for the century or two.

InformationWeek’s Matthew Schwartz explains:

Smartphone banking applications from Bank of America, Chase, PayPal, TD Ameritrade, USAA, Wells Fargo, and Vanguard have bugs which an attacker could exploit to steal people’s personal financial information. So said digital forensics firm viaForensics in a security warning released Thursday.

“We encountered a surprising and increasing amount of highly sensitive financial and identity information on smartphones,” said Andrew Hoog, CIO of viaForensics. “This information, uncovered on both Apple iPhones and Google Android devices, would only benefit cyber criminals and identity thieves. While Google and Apple each approach the app review process differently, neither approach has prevented insecure applications from being installed.”

Major vulnerabilities encountered included some applications failing to validate security certificates, leaving them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Such attacks could recover “full user name, password, and account data,” said Hoog. Other applications failed to encrypt transmitted passwords, sending them as clear text. Others inappropriately “saved your data to the smartphone, allowing recovery of all financial information viewed in the application.”

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The first rule of usability testing is “Know Thy User.” This is true regardless of what type of application you are testing, whether it be a CRM platform, an online retail site and especially mobile applications. We present this image from TechCrunch to help all you mobile app testers out there better understand your users.

With the mid-term elections happening right now, infomobile.com was kind enough to summarize five Android apps to help you stay on top of the election results. Here they are:

CNN Elections Center: “Follow the race to Election Day with the CNN Election Center App. Contribute to the iReport Elections Project and help CNN take the political pulse of the country. Follow up to 15 races and locate your polling center with the app. Then on November 2, get Election Day news alerts and follow race results as they come in.”

Election Caster: “TalkBack feature enables you to send a note or share stories directly with your elected officials! Covers U.S. issues, elections, candidates, government, law, republicans, democrats, congress, President Obama.”

VoterMap: “VoterMap is the map based forum for political discussion, anywhere in the world. Post and comment on current issues: Pres. Obama, Elections, Tea Party, Democrats, Republicans, Mosque at Ground Zero, Immigration, Abortion, local and regional issues. Debate with others and vote!”

Voter Fraud Mobile: “Voter Fraud for the Android was built with American liberty in mind. Voter Fraud provides a free and intuitive platform to help citizens report instances of vote fraud, illegal campaign tactics, and intimidation at the polls. With its easy to use design the Voter Fraud application drives transparency and accountability.”

Google Election Center (mobile site): “Google Election Center helps you provide up-to-date election information to voters and create custom search tools for your website. The Election Center Data Manager will guide you through the process of uploading and validating your information. After receiving your information, Google will display election information to your voters through our Maps application.”

Venture Beat jumped on the story, and as a mobile nerd I had to post about it.

Google had previously indicated they are not creating a “Nexus 2/Second Google Phone,” but something tells me they were deflecting your attention away, because no software companies bend the truth anymore right?

Well Samsung has invited Android Media folks (according to Cnet among others) to a special event on November 8th unveiling a “new Android device.” What else would be so big for Samsung to release after they just were finished launching an incredible line of Galaxy S phones running Android?

All this news ties in with the question I posed in my last blog post about which version number would be assigned to the Gingerbread OS. It appears to be confirmed from many sources that Gingerbread will indeed be 2.3. What really seals the deal for me on this version number? Android Central’s post yesterday which displays the Google analytics that have v2.3 listed as an official OS version.

Now we must all speculate that the 3.0.1 OS that is listed is clearly Honeycomb. Speculate! Now!

No, probably not. But it looks like we are getting a confirmation, without getting an official confirmation, that the next name in the desert line of Android OS is Gingerbread (thanks to our friends over at AndroidCentral for picking this up).

The real question is will Gingerbread be Android 2.3, 2.5, or 3.0? With the rumors already floating around of the Gingerbread predecessor being Honeycomb. And the folks behind the desert, have been rumored to be planning to build Honeycomb to the tablet style device, I’m leaning towards Gingerbread being version 2.3.

Check out the Google unwrapping video at HQ and let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Not long ago, I suggested (partly in jest) that someone should create a mobile app that makes it easier to text while driving. With several states having made DWT an offense punishable by death (okay, a small fine), I thought it would be a marketable product. So you can imagine how excited I was to see that iSpeech has released DriveSafe.ly 2.0 for Android. Here’s the story from TechCrunch:

A noble attempt to make driving a safer experience for those of us addicted to text based communication via our phones, Drivesafe.ly 2.0 currently allows you to respond to your email and text messages via speech if you’re on a Blackberry and respond to texts with voice and have your emails read to you out loud (see demo video, above) if you’re on an Android phone.

While the speech to text feature is currently only available for text messages on an Android, a build with full email, text and Twitter functionality should be available in the next week on both platforms.

To set DriveSafe.ly up, you download the app in the Android or Blackberry app store or here, turn it on, click on settings and fill in your app preferences for communication while you’re driving. It may take some getting used to (the jarring speech response product has a tendency to mess up) before you’re driving and emailing in “safe” mode full force.

DriveSafe.ly, which also recently opened its API to mobile developers, currently has over six million users and has read over 250 million text messages in its three year life span.

Anyway, here’s a video of how the application works:

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A few weeks back, guest blogger Anuj Gupta laid out the basics of mobile operating systems and platforms, where he covered Symbian, iPhone, Windows Mobile and RIM OS among others. Here is part II of the article. In this post, Anuj dives into BREW, J2me, Maemo, Limo Qtopia and others.

Anuj is a Creative Writer, Marcom Consultant and a Technology enthusiast with 4+ years of experience in Mobile technologies and Advertising. He undertakes various freelance assignments apart from his job as a marcom executive in an IT firm. Read more of his writings at http://www.techmodish.blogspot.com/.

BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) from Qualcomm

Brew is an application development platform originally developed for CDMA mobile phones, but it also supports GSM  for some devices. It debuted in September 2001 as a software platform. It can download and run small programs for playing games, sending messages, sharing photos, and the like. The main advantage of BREW platforms is that the application developers can easily port their applications between all Qualcomm devices. BREW acts between the application and the wireless device on-chip operating system in order to allow programmers to develop applications without needing to code for system interface or understand wireless applications.

J2me by Sun

Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) is Sun’s version of Java aimed at machines with limited hardware resources such as PDAs, cell phones, and other consumer electronic and embedded devices. J2ME is aimed at machines with as little as 128KB of RAM and with processors a lot less powerful than those used on typical desktop and server machines. J2ME actually consists of a set of profiles. Each profile is defined for a particular type of device — cell phones, PDAs, microwave ovens, etc. — and consists of a minimum set of class libraries required for the particular type of device and a specification of a Java virtual machine required to support the device.

The most common of these are the Mobile Information Device Profile aimed at mobile devices, such as cell phones, and the Personal Profile aimed at consumer products and embedded devices like set-top boxes and PDAs. Profiles are subsets of configurations, of which there are currently two: the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) and the Connected Device Configuration (CDC).

There are more than 2 billion Java ME enabled mobile phones and PDAs.

Maemo from Nokia

Maemo is a software platform developed by Nokia for smartphones and Internet Tablets. It is based on the Debian operating system.

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Rumors of the mobile web’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Despite some compelling arguments in Wired’s latest series – where experts assert that native apps have (or will soon) totally displace the web as a medium of choice – we’re not quite ready to pull the plug. Apparently, neither is the general public. Not just yet.

More on that in a second, but first, let’s examine why some are making this claim. It’s true that there’s been a meaningful shift towards native apps over the last few years, thanks mostly to the iPhone and its offspring (i.e. smartphones). What was once the Great Wide Open, the Internet has been parceled into what Wired calls “semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.”

In other words:

You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service….

You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone…

Quite true. But you are also NOT alone if you’re still using the mobile web. As part of our weekly “What Do uThink” poll question, we asked our community whether they prefer to get information via native apps or the mobile web. Here were the results:

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