Mobile App Testing

Before we get too far into 2012 lets take a look at the trends going into this year. Here are some key facts about the 2011 mobile market, from InformationWeek:

It’s Apple, Samsung Versus Everyone Else: Globally, Apple sold 37 million iPhones in the fourth quarter of 2011 and 93 million for the entire year. Samsung sold 36.5 million smartphones during the fourth quarter and 97.4 million for the entire year. Nokia ranks a distant third, with 19 million smartphones sold in the fourth quarter and 77.3 million sold for the year.

Android And iOS Will Lead For Foreseeable Future: Together, Android and iOS own approximately 76.3% of the U.S. smartphone market. Android has 46.3% of the market, while iOS has about 30%. RIM’s BlackBerry platform is third with about 15%. The remaining 10% is owned by Windows Mobile, PalmOS, webOS, and Windows Phone.

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ReadWriteWeb just released its list of “Top 10 Mobile Products of 2011.” It looks like they didn’t take the task lightly and made sure all the major players in each category got considered. Here’s what they had to say about the process:

Looking back on 2011, it may be remembered as The Year Of Mobile. Sure, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and all the other platforms existed in previous years but historians will look back at 2011 and say that it was the year that the way an entire populace interacts with information fundamentally changed. Mobile is not just for the early adopters anymore. Smartphones are everywhere.

What made waves in the mobile realm this year? … To make the mobile list, a product had to be built to fundamentally work inside mobile platforms, hence the platforms themselves (iOS, Android flavors etc.) do not make the list. …

Our 2011 list includes location services, security, social networking, payments, HTML5, NFC among other topics. The next year will be fascinating to watch these platforms grow into things that normal people would have never dreamed of creating. In December 2012 this list will have more HTML5 components and NFC will be in the hands of many more people.

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Here in the U.S. it sure seems like everyone and their mother has a smartphone these days. But when you take a global snapshot of the cellphone market it turns out that only 27% of cell owners are sporting a smartphone, according to a recent study by VisionMobile. TechCrunch does a nice job of summarizing the report and including some great infographics:

With all the talk of iPhone vs. Android these days, it’s easy to forget how the majority of the world’s mobile users still make calls and access data: via feature phones. A recently released report (download) from mobile strategy firm VisionMobile takes a look at today’s mobile marketplace finding that, despite the sharp rise in smartphone shipments over 2010 and 2011, global smartphone penetration (by OS) is at just 27%.

Smartphone adoption varies wildly by region, the report finds. Not surprisingly, those markets where 3G coverage is extensive and subscription plans are “post-paid” (as opposed to pre-paid) see the highest smartphone adoption rates. Meanwhile, in markets dominated by pre-paid subscriptions, the real battle is price. Here, Nokia’s mid-tier Symbian platforms and BlackBerry consumer-targeted models are still holding onto significant market share. However, both platforms are now facing threats from low-cost Android phones, thanks to the latter’s pricing versatility. Android devices today sell for anywhere from $100 to $750 (USD), allowing the phones to compete both on the high-end and the low-end of the pricing spectrum.

In the North American and European markets, smartphone penetration is the highest, with 63% and 51% market share, respectively. In the Asia-Pacific region (19%), Africa/Middle East region (18%) and Latin America (17%), it’s much lower.

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iPhones and Androids have been quickly rising in popularity over the past few years but the Blackberry has managed to hold strong in its place as the supreme business smartphone … until this year. According to a quarterly survey by iPass, iPhones have now taken over in the world of enterprise. Wired has the scoop:

Crushed under an avalanche of Angry Birds, FourSquare check-ins, and Skype chatter, the BlackBerry is finally losing its grip on the enterprise.

At least, that’s what mobile services seller iPass found in its latest survey of people who use mobile devices such as laptops and smartphones for work.

Last year, mobile workers surveyed by iPass reported that more companies allowed BlackBerries than any other smartphone — nearly 35 percent, compared to 31 percent for the iPhone. Now the iPhone reigns supreme. This year, it was allowed in 45 percent of the 1,100 companies surveyed, compared to just 32 percent for the BlackBerry.

Google’s Android is making inroads too. The iPass survey found that Android usage had jumped from 11 percent in 2010 to 21 percent this year.

What’s going on? Corporate IT is loosening its grip on mobile devices, says Kevin Murray vice president of product marketing at iPass. “Back in the day the corporation bought your phone and they told you what you were going to have,” he says. Now fewer companies are provisioning smartphones. “They’re saying you can bring your iPhone in and we’re going to give you access.”

And it’s not just so that social media addicts can post Twitter updates from the water cooler.

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IBM recently released its 2011 Tech Trends Report. They surveyed more than 4,000 IT professionals across 93 countries to get a sense of where IT will be headed in the next two years. The main topics that kept coming up were business analytics, mobile computing, cloud computing and social business. Each topic gets about two pages in the brief (visually appealing) report … here’s what they said about mobile computing:

Mobile computing is here to stay, and offers room for IT professional growth as more and more organizations build mobile applications. Globally, Android emerged as the top platform for mobile application development; 70% of respondents are expected to develop for the Android platform over the next 24 months, while 49% plan to develop for iOS. …

Developers looking to increase their mobile skills would be smart to look to Android. With its large and growing global install base, Android is ranked as being the top mobile platform over the next 24 months. This open source platform based on Java and XML offers a much shorter learning curve, and this contributes to its popularity with IT professionals. iOS remains strong in the U.S. and other developed countries.

As an effective channel in reaching many users and as a means of increasing the productivity and efficiency of an organization’s workforce, mobile is viewed by respondents as the second most “in demand” area for software development.
Mobile computing has a high level of penetration, with three in four survey respondents currently working in mobile computing, growing to 85% within the next two years. Respondents see enterprise and industry-specific applications as top areas for adoption within 24 months, with extending mobile capabilities to existing core applications close behind.

Check out the full report >>>

Back in July Mike wrote about a new AT&T Labs Research report that took a look at end to end data transmission paths in an attempt to figure out why some apps drain so much battery life or are slow. The researchers “discovered the source of the problem in the complex interactions between the application, device and the cellular network, looking into network architecture and lower level protocols that are typically hidden from application developers.” Here’s the root of the issue and an example from AT&T’s report:

In particular, application developers are usually unaware of cellular specific characteristics that incur potentially complex interaction with the application behavior. Even for professional developers, they often do not have visibility into the resource-constrained mobile execution environment. Such situations potentially result in smartphone applications that are not cellular-friendly, i.e., their radio channel utilization or device energy consumption are inefficient because of a lack of transparency in the lower-layer protocol behavior. For example, we discovered that for Pandora, a popular music streaming application on smartphones, due to the poor interaction between the radio resource control policy and the application’s data transfer scheduling mechanism, 46% of its radio energy is spent on periodic audience measurements that account for only 0.2% of received user data.

In the most recently released highlight of the report, AT&T Labs Research identifies 11 ways to build efficient apps that will work no matter what carrier you’re targeting (all the recommendations are aimed at carrier-independent standards and protocols). Here’s the list:

• Understand Mobile Networks
• Handle Multiple Simultaneous TCP Connections
• Reduce Inefficient Connections with Periodic Transfers
• Deal with Connection Opening Problems
• Close Connections As Soon As Possible
• Offload to Wi-Fi
• Handle Duplicate Content and Caching
• Utilize Pre-fetching
• Manage Peripherals
• Upgrade from HTTP 1.0
• Handle Screen Rotations

Now let’s break down a few. Since the first few tips were more or less covered in July’s initial post, we’ll jump down the list a bit.

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And perhaps testing, too. Here’s the story from msn.com:

Blackberry-maker Research-in Motion today said it will offer engineering students BASE (BlackBerry Application Student Entrepreneur) platform to enable them display their creativity in developing applications for its mobile phones.

The service, which will be available in Tamil Nadu, would help third- and fourth-year engineering students develop applications that would be used in AppWorld, BlackBerry Research in Motion India Head of Alliances Annie Mathew said.

AppWorld is the application store of Blackberry.

“It is an excellent example on academicia-industry collaboration. BASE would help them develop applications that will be made available in AppWorld,” she told reporters here.

She said this is the first time that such an initiative was taken by Research in Motion and the reason to select Tamil Nadu was it producing good number engineering graduates.

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Thinking of using a simulator or emulator on your next mobile app testing project? Not so fast. Here’s an extract from an eBook on Launching Killer Mobile Apps that discusses some of the pros and cons on the use of mobile simulators and emulators.

Pros: In many ways, the use of mobile emulators and simulators is essential for developing and testing a quality application. Such technology enables developers to verify certain functionality that is not specific to any device, carrier or operating system. They are also very useful in terms of usability, and especially design, including data input, screen size, button use, etc. – all from the convenience of their own laptop.

Although many mobile app companies rely on these tools to identify bugs at an early stage in development , they often fail to catch bugs at later stages. As we’ve seen, these type of bugs are always the most expensive to correct.

Cons: One of the biggest challenges for mobile developers is that the testing of applications is occurring in an environment far removed from the real world, where actual users run and interact with those applications ON their devices. Said differently, the gap between “in-the-lab” simulation and “in-the-wild” usage is far too great to ignore.

Consider, for instance, an application that is data entry intensive. To assume that it can be fully tested on a simulator (i.e. with full keyboard and mouse access) and be ready for release is a mistake mobile app developers have continually made for the past five years. The convenience of simulators and emulators has made it easier than ever to be lured into a false sense of security. But the advantages of such tools are limited in scope, and should never be considered a substitute for real-world, on-device testing.

Read the entire free eBook >>>

The concept of mobile security (or lack thereof) is quickly entering the mainstream, although most consumers still do not consider themselves to be at risk. Here with a serious reminder to the contrary is ZDNet.com, who’ve recently published a great article on the top security threats for each of the major smartphone devices and operating systems.

Here are few of the top security threats for each major device:

iOS devices
The iOS security model is well designed and has proven to be largely resistant to most types of attacks, but this does not necessarily mean that iOS users do not face risk now or that the risk will not increase in future, Hall noted.

1. Jailbroken devices not safe
Having a provenance approach is a good security implantation for smart phones, Hall said, but Apple’s provenance approach applies to devices that have not been “jailbroken”.

Under Apple’s model, each iOS app is digitally signed to carry the mark of the author and for tamper-resistance. This enables an end-user to decide whether to use an application based on the author’s identity, and for publishers to analyze the application for security risks before publication, Hall explained.

Symantec’s Norton Mobile Security Whitepaper revealed that jailbroken devices have already been the target of at least two computer worm attacks, and will likely be the target of increasing volumes of malware in the future.

Android devices
The security model of Android platforms is a major improvement over the models used by traditional desktop and server-based Oses, Hall noted, but “no one mobile platform is perfect”.

Naveen Hegde, senior market analyst at IDC Asia-Pacific, pointed out that the openness of the platform will make Android devices “susceptible to virus and intrusions”.

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