Mobile App Testing

When was the last time you used a mobile device for your banking? How about to read the news or check the score? Look up the hours of your favorite shop or restaurant? Pay a bill? I’d venture to say probably within the last 24 hours, if not more recently.

In addition to all the time spent playing games on mobile devices, we’ve also come to rely on them as a means of accessing our favorite (or necessary) businesses. And the enterprise world is embracing that trend. From ReadWriteMobile:

No industry vertical has been more disrupted by the evolution of the smartphone than the enterprise. …

Brands are flocking to apps. From March 2010 to September 2011 there was a 263% growth in branded apps. Many of those apps are done in-house but there is a distinct opportunity for developers to make money by focusing on apps for the enterprise and brands.

Business apps were the fastest growing section in the Apple App Store from 2009 to 2010, up 186%. That growth remains strong and more development studios and large corporations, like IBM, are offering solutions for enterprise deployment.

I pulled out anpart of the article’s accompanying infographic (created by [x]cube LABS) I thought would be most pertinent to testers. If you want to read the complete article, visit ReadWriteMobile. And if you want to see the complete infographic, be sure to check out [x]cube LABS.

If the trends continue there’s going to be a lot of testing needs on the horizon!

We know the world (or at least the U.S.) is getting more and more mobile-centric. Online shopping stats for mobile devices exploded in 2011 (see here and here). In addition to shopping, we use mobile devices to read, surf the web, play games, get the news and the latest scores, keep in contact with friends, acquaintances and total strangers, take photos and videos, do our banking, just about anything you can think of. We’re so attached to our mobile devices, in fact, that it’s beginning to be a “mobile-first world,” according to GigaOm.

In the last day, I’ve gotten two notes from start-ups that began on the web but have seen their businesses transformed by mobile, as users increasingly shift their consumption to mobile apps and browsers. This might seem obvious in a world in which services like Twitter and Pandora now get most of their traffic from mobile. But it bears highlighting because the trend is happening across all sorts of apps and websites and that has implications for developers, publishers and businesses, who must now consider what a mobile-first world looks like.

The latest examples came to me from online design store Fab.com, which just launched in June and then pushed out its first mobile apps for iOS and Android in October. In just three months, it said that 30 percent of its traffic is now on mobile. MyYearbook, a social networking site that was bought by Quepasa last year, said, thanks to a big holiday push, it now has 54 percent of its traffic coming in on mobile.

Read more…

Since this was the last hoorah for Microsoft at CES, we’re not completely surprised that they decided to start some controversy. With a little help from Nokia, it looks like a new mobile war is underway. Make of this what you will (via Wired):

Nokia declared all-out war on the mobile industry on Monday, publicly unveiling its flagship U.S. device at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The new device, the Nokia Lumia 900, is the first Nokia-made phone to run on AT&T’s 4G LTE network, the high-speed wireless mobile network slowly expanding across the States.

The Lumia 900 runs the Windows Phone operating system, and in showing off the device, Nokia president and CEO Stephen Elop re-emphasized Nokia’s dedication to Microsoft’s mobile platform. Nokia is the only major mobile device manufacturer to bet the house completely on Microsoft’s platform alone (other Windows Phone manufacturers like HTC and Samsung also make Android phones).

“We believe that the industry has shifted from a battle of devices, to a war of ecosystems,” Elop said at a press conference on Monday. “With Lumia, our intent is to establish a series of beachheads…it started in Europe, now in the U.S., and more in the coming year.”

Elop wasn’t alone. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer joined Elop, his former Microsoft lieutenant, at the press conference on stage, a clear signal that the companies are betting big on one another. Towering above Elop and the rest of the crowd on stage, Ballmer delivered the rallying cry for his company’s small-but-rapidly developing platform at the event.

Read the rest >>>

According to a new study from Flurry, daily web consumption has stayed relatively steady over the past two years … but app consumption has skyrocketed! Read about it at TechCrunch:

Mobile analytics firm Flurry has updated its report from last summer which compared mobile apps to web consumption and found that apps came out on top. In June, Flurry discovered that users were spending 81 minutes per day in mobile apps versus 74 minutes on the web. As of December, the usage of mobile apps has skyrocketed to 94 minutes per day, while web consumption dropped to 72 minutes.

The interesting thing about this data is that the most recent growth in mobile apps usage hasn’t really been at the expense of browsing the traditional web. People have just been using mobile apps more. We should note, however, that Flurry pulls its web data from comScore and Alexa, which aren’t always the best sources and use differing methodologies to determine browsing habits. In addition, users of mobile apps also browse the web, so it’s not so much a question of apps “versus” the web, as it is a look into our data consumption in general (despite Flurry’s positioning it as a battle that’s to be won or lost).

But the bottom line is: apps are hot. …

As a part of today’s research report, Flurry also provided insight into which mobile app categories were the most popular. Not surprisingly, games led with nearly half (49%) of U.S. users’ time spent. Social networking (30%), Entertainment (7%) and News (6%) followed, with the “Other” category (accounting for everything else) at 8%.

Read the whole article >>>

I promise, I’ll stop with the “year end” and “look ahead” lists soon … like in May. There are just so many good ones that make so many good points that I still can’t resist writing about them. But today’s post takes one of those lists and focuses in on a type of testing we don’t often write about – localization testing!

On Christmas Day, GigaOm posted “The year in mobile apps: Where we’ve been, where we’re going.” Here’s a quick recap:

In 2011…

We spent more time in apps than browsing.

The iOS App Store proved it is still the place for devs who want to make money.

The app obsession went international.

Google promised, but did not deliver a solution to the Android update problem.

In 2012…

Read more…

From the New York Times:

The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth.

Arieso, a company in Newbury, England, that advises mobile operators in Europe, the United States and Africa, documented the statistical gap when it tracked 1.1 million customers of a European mobile operator during a 24-hour period in November.

The gap between extreme users and the rest of the population is widening, according to Arieso. In 2009, the top 3 percent of heavy users generated 40 percent of network traffic. Now, Arieso said, these users pump out 70 percent of the traffic.

Read the rest >>>

Presented without comment:

The thought of using physical game pieces in conjunction with a smartphone/tablet game just got a whole lot cooler!

RC Car + Arduino + iPad from Wannes Vermeulen on Vimeo.

Here’s how it works according to PCWorld:

Using two servo motors, an Arduino Uno microcontroller, the accelerometer data from an iPad, as well as an old Android smartphone for a camera on the car, Vermeulen was able to create what may be the greatest racing video game ever.

Analyst Chetan Sharma took a step back from making his own predictions about the world of mobile to ask others what they thought 2012 would bring. ReadWriteWeb has some of the results:

• Sharma’s insiders vote Google the “most open player in the mobile ecosystem” for 2012. Granted, the options are not that much better, but Google rocked the competition with a little less than 70% of the vote while no other player, including Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, the carriers, OEMs or Amazon got more than 10%. This is the fourth year that Google has been the most open in the mobile according to Sharma’s polls, though the percentage has been decreasing since its peak in 2010.

• The insiders are still high on mobile payments as the breakthrough category for 2012. … The next breakthrough category is mCommerce followed by mHealth, enterprise and near field communications. Sharma’s insiders are not nearly so high on mobile advertising as they were a year ago.

Read more…

A new video confirms that no, they can’t. Still pretty funny though. Take a look: