Mobile App Testing

Adobe’s Flash has not been playing nicely with mobile devices for years, but now the disagreement is coming to an end … and Flash is going away (on new mobile browsers, not all together). The announcement was made on Tuesday to Adobe partners via email. Here’s Wired with more details…

In an abrupt about-face in its mobile software strategy, Adobe will soon cease developing its Flash Player plug-in for mobile browsers, according to an e-mail sent to Adobe partners on Tuesday evening.

And with that e-mail flash, Adobe has signaled that it knows, as Steve Jobs predicted, the end of the Flash era on the web is coming soon.

The e-mail, obtained and first reported on by ZDNet, says that Adobe will no longer continue to “adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations,” instead focusing on alternative application packaging programs and the HTML5 protocol.

“Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores,” the quoted e-mail says.

…

The move indicates a massive backpedaling on Adobe’s part, a company who championed its Flash platform in the face of years of naysaying about its use on mobile devices. Despite Flash’s near ubiquity across desktop PCs, many in the greater computing industry, including, famously, Apple Computer, have denounced the platform as fundamentally unstable on mobile browsers, and an intense battery drain. In effect, Flash’s drawbacks outweigh the benefits on mobile devices.

Read the full article at Wired >>>

Not all 4G is created equal. RootMetrics spent the last eight months sending people around the country to measure 4G data speed across carriers in different locations. Take a look at what they found:

RootMetrics™, the first independent service to measure mobile experience from a consumer’s point of view, announced today a comprehensive progress report detailing how the four national mobile carriers are performing when it comes to delivering 4G data speeds. Since March 2011, members of the RootMetrics test squad have traveled the country and performed more than 238,000 data tests in 27* different local markets. By aggregating all of these data test results, the company has identified patterns of performance and can isolate carrier consistencies. During this eight-month timeframe, Verizon dominated the competition as a result of its LTE rollout, delivering 4G speeds in 66 percent of the tests. AT&T edged past T-Mobile, hitting 4G speeds in 41 percent of the tests. T-Mobile recorded 4G speeds in 40 percent of the tests and Sprint delivered 4G speeds in 33 percent of the tests.

“We’re in the midst of a rapidly changing mobile environment. During months of testing, we’ve been looking for answers to one of the questions we hear time and again from consumers – which carrier has the fastest network?” commented Bill Moore, CEO of RootMetrics. “This Progress Report aims to provide some context around what people are hearing today from the carriers, but also to give a snapshot of what these speeds mean in real-world terms.”

Read more and get specifics on your carrier at PRWeb >>>

Ever wonder why your app isn’t getting the attention it deserves? You’re not alone. Here’s Wade Roush of Xconomy on the problem of mobile app search:

There are roughly 500,000 iPhone and iPad apps in Apple’s iTunes App Store, and almost that many smartphone and tablet apps in Google’s Android Market. That gives mobile consumers lots of choices, but it has created an untenable situation for mobile developers. Unless you get lucky and your app vaults onto the top-5 or top-10 charts, or is anointed as a “New and Noteworthy” or “Featured” app by a human curator at Apple or Google, it’s virtually impossible to get noticed amidst all the noise. As a result, there’s a very long tail of perfectly good apps that are failing to find their natural audiences, simply because mobile users have no way to discover them short of browsing page after page of poorly organized lists in the app stores.

I’ve been covering technology long enough to remember when there were 500,000 sites on the entire World Wide Web. That was back in mid-1996, when Yahoo-style guides and directories were still considered the best way to find new stuff. As the Web swelled—to 1.7 million sites by December 1997 and 3.7 million by December 1998—the directory model quickly became unworkable, and people started turning to first-generation search engines like AltaVista.

Read the rest >>>

Earlier this year, Mozilla announced plans to create a web-based OS that would help developers create mobile apps that function across multiple operating systems. The company plans to begin testing this quarter and have more advanced functionality completed next year. Check out the details on TechWorld:

Mozilla developers to test Boot to Gecko mobile OS

Mozilla developers hope to start testing phones running its new mobile operating system this quarter, with product demos slated for the first quarter next year and production set for before June 2012, according to a road map on the project’s website.

Mozilla announced the project, called Boot to Gecko (B2G), in July, describing it as an operating system for mobile devices that would run applications primarily on the web.

Developers hope B2G will help solve a problem that has long plagued the mobile industry: Developers must rewrite apps for each operating system. The goal of B2G is to create a framework that would let applications run from the web on any operating system, provided the OS supports B2G’s technology.

By the end of this year, the developers hope to have basic functions built and integrated including the accelerometer, camera, messaging, telephony and power management, according to the road map recently posted on the site.

Read more at TechWorld >>>

Since the launch of Apple’s iOS 5 and the latest iPhone, whispers about poor battery life have been floating around. Apple publicly addressed the issues yesterday and announced plans to correct the issues.

This is what Apple had to say to AllThingsD:

Apple on Wednesday said it had found a few problems that are leading some iPhone customers to experience less-than-expected battery life with iPhones running its latest software.

“A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices,” Apple said in a statement to AllThingsD. “We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks.”

Apple declined to comment beyond the statement.

Complaints about battery life issues have been growing on the Web in recent days, but began shortly after both iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S were made publicly available last month.

The problems appear to vary based on what network a user is on, usage patterns and other factors.

Read more at AllThingsD >>>

Siri’s not telling. Here’s the story from CNET.com. Note the Speedtest.net tool mentioned in the blurb.

How we test
It’s generally hard to figure out the way to get the best picture of how fast a mobile cellular Internet device’s data rate is. The truth is that the speed of a cellular Internet connection varies a great deal from one location to another. On top of that, it also depends on the server on which the app’s data resides and sometimes even on the time of day.

For the testing, I used the Speedtest.net mobile app, which is the most popular app for the purpose. The app automatically connects to a nearby server to download and upload data. How busy the server is during the test affects the scores, but the app still offers a good representation of data speeds in a local area.

I gathered iPhone 4Ses from AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, and tested the three smartphones against an iPhone 4G at a few well-known places in San Francisco: CNET’s lobby, Union Square, and the Fisherman’s Wharf area of Pier 39. I picked the first location for an obvious reason: it’s the lobby of the building where I work, which is right in the middle of the Financial District. The others are two of the most popular spots in the city, with lots of people using their phones. Also, I tested three 4G hot spots from various carriers for a comparison.

Keep in mind that these tests only evaluate data speeds for these phones in San Francisco and are not designed to be representative of data speeds you’ll find in your area. However, they at least should show how the data speeds compare between each carrier version of the iPhone 4S, as well as the difference between AT&T’s iPhone 4S and iPhone 4G.

Read more at CNET.com >>>

Apparently there’s a new threat out there for mobile users: zombies (but not of the brain-eating variety). Here’s the scoop from Voxy:

AVG (AU/NZ) Pty Ltd, the distributor of the award-winning AVG Internet and mobile security software in Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific, is alerting mobile device users to update their security to protect against the latest cyber crime threat: mobile Zombies.

As Halloween revellers turn themselves into the familiar fantasy version of these creatures, smartphones and tablets across the planet are being fully equipped by remote cyber-criminals to take actions against key personal, commercial and governmental assets – long before they can be effectively tracked.

A Zombie is an Internet-enabled computing device that has been hacked to perform tasks under instructions from others. Most owners of Zombie devices have no idea their system literally lies in wait to be called into a range of actions, such as:

*Click fraud – waged against sites displaying pay-per-click advertising, essentially stealing from online retailers

*Denial-of-service attacks – the orchestrated flooding of target internet addresses by a large number of computers to crash it and prevent access from legitimate users, often aiming to take down popular website

*Debilitating spam – spammers avoid detection and pass bandwidth costs to device owners

*Harvesting of personally identifiable information (identity theft)

*Spreading and/or updating new malware

*Sending SMS to premium numbers with high charges

Read more…

Here’s Eddy Bruin, a native of The Netherlands who has been working as a test consultant within Capgemini from the beginning of 2008. Since then, he has been working for several clients like ING Bank and ING Investment Management. In this video, gives us a sneak-peek on his presentation about mobile app testing.

Here’s a quick interview with mobile app testing expert Karen Johnson, as part of uTest’s STPCon 2011 video series. Karen is the owner of Software Test Management, Inc. and has been an active contributor to software testing conferences and quality assurance groups for many years. Stanton Champion caught up with her and asked about the mobile testing workshop she ran earlier this week:

Want to see more interviews from STPCon? Check out the full list of videos here.