Mobile App Testing

You know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words? Well in the case of Android fragmentation – a subject discussed at great length here and on the uTest blog – a picture is worth a few thousand devices.

The image you’re seeing is a data chart of thousands of separate device models encountered by the dev team at OpenSignalMaps over the course of a six month period. It may not be a flashy infographic, but it’s one of the best visuals I’ve seen to convey the challenge of Android hardware fragmentation. Here with more details on the chart (and on Android fragmentation in general) is arstechnica:

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The debate has been raging for awhile: Which will win out? Mobile websites or native apps?

There have been solid arguments for both and even hybrid compromises (like native app icons that take you to a mobile site). But another melding of the two forms has just appeared in the form on CNET’s new mobile site.

In an article published yesterday CNET details how the design aesthetics of a native app influenced the redesign of their mobile site. The thought they put into their site is thorough and interesting and might just give mobile site designers a few ideas to think about and build on. Here’s what CNET did:

We know that there’s nothing as frustrating as a hard-to-navigate mobile Web site. There’s so little space on a phone screen that every pixel has to earn its keep. So when we redesigned our m.cnet.com site from the ground up, we took cues from something everyone knows and loves: mobile apps.

First, we simplified the layout of our mobile site and made its navigation familiar to anyone who uses Facebook, Path, or any other common mobile app. …

Just because m.cnet.com looks like an app doesn’t mean that is an app, though. Anytime you click a link that takes you to a CNET page on your phone’s browser, you’ll get this experience whether you’ve installed a CNET app or not. We’ve made our article pages clean and easy to read, with standard sharing navigation at the upper right.

Get more details at CNET >>>

Has anyone used the new CNET mobile site? What do you think of it? Is it intuitive and easy to navigate or did CNET miss their mark? Is the concept of “native app design for mobile web” something you think will or should catch on?

The readers of the SD Times (Software Development Times) are probably a fairly good subset of the population to poll when you’re interested in how many companies are buying into the mobile app phenomenon. Well BZ Research (another arm of SD Times’ owner BZ Media) did just that and found that 70% of its respondents planned on having a mobile app within the next 18 months. No word on how many people took part in the survey.

Here’s a few numbers for you:

• Of those already building apps tablet specific apps are betting out phone-targeted apps 88.1% to 82.3%
• Apps for e-readers are grabbing the attention of 9.8% of companies
• Android apps barely beat out iOS at a rate of 63.9% versus 63.6%
• 1 in 5 companies are developing for Blackberry

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We write a lot about the scope of mobile fragmentation (particularly within Android) and the vastness of the testing matrix related to that fragmentation. Usually it’s viewed as a pain in the side of developers because it makes it difficult to know how their apps will preform across different devices/OS/etc. It’s also a pain for testers and end users who are upset when a glaring bug appears or an app isn’t offered for their device.

But the folks over at Sourcebits (a development company) used some space in VentureBeat to counter that assertion. In fact, they present five reason mobile fragmentation is actually good for developers! Here’s a summary of their five reasons:

Big fish, small pond

Look at Amazon’s Android-based, highly customized Kindle Fire. Small platform, some might say — perhaps even a niche within a niche. But that’s actually a positive. “We’re seeing impressive uptake on Kindle Fire and Amazon’s marketplace,” said Nat Trienens, co-founder and Director of Mobile Services for Fuzz Productions in New York. “There aren’t as many apps in that market, so there’s a bigger opportunity to get better market position.”

Mobile is really, really, really big

There are currently almost 6 billion people on the globe who have a mobile phone, according to the International Telecommunications Union. 6. Billion. People. That’s a lot. And many of them have or will soon have smartphones: IDC tells us that 491 million smartphones were shipped in 2011.

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Interested in developing apps for the upcoming Windows 8 but don’t want to shell out the money right now for a lowly Windows 7 tablet? Fear not, Splashtop has your back!

The remote desktop maker has created a new iOS app called Win8 Metro Testbed that will allow developers to test their Windows 8 apps on an iPad (before Windows 8 is even available). Here’s their thinking (from Gigaom):

Why an iPad? Cliff Miller, Splashtop’s president of its Asia/Pacific region and chief marketing officer, said this of the potential Windows 8 developers the company is targeting:

“If they want to test their app with touch gestures there’s only one way to do that and that is to buy a Windows tablet, and that can cost $500 to $1,000 or more. … And 99 percent of Win8 tablet developers — they have iPads.”

Now, there are no Windows 8 tablets on the market yet. Microsoft has unveiled a public preview of the software, but the finished version of the desktop/tablet OS is supposed to roll out to the public some time in October. Developers can test their apps on Windows 7 tablets in the meantime, but to Miller’s point, it’s a hefty expense for some individual developers and smaller shops.

Read the full article at Gigaom >>>

So if you are interested in developing or testing an app for the up-and-coming Windows platform, break out the iPad and get cracking! Then when October rolls around and you feel comfortable buying the newest Windows tablet, you’ll already have an awesome app available in the Win8 store!

SEO has been a buzz word for a good few years now, but that’s old news. Now it’s all about ASO, “App Store Optimization.”

Until now the best way to score app downloads was to be featured in one of the app stores. And to do this you either A. had to be getting a ton of downloads anyway or B. have an amazing app that happened to get picked up by the people running the store and highlighted in the featured apps area – not an easy feat. But now a new movement of optimizing apps for search is getting into full swing. I wrote a few months ago about optimizing your app name for easier on-device searching (after it’s already been downloaded). Now that concept of app optimization is being put into practice with an eye toward app store searches, this time targeting the keywords used to describe an app. From TechCrunch:

With over 600,000+ iOS applications, and now some 450,000 on Android, the real challenge for developers is having their app surfaced higher than hundreds of other competitors in the app store search results. Doing this correctly involves ASO, or app store optimization. It’s basically SEO repurposed for mobile….

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Some six months ago Apple warned app developers that pulling UDID information (the unique identification number tied to each Apple device) was soon going to be a no-no with iOS 5. The company said it would “deprecate UDIDs” because of privacy concerns. Nothing more was really said about it. Then, late last month, app developers began receiving these rejection notifications:

TechCrunch explains why Apple is now limiting access to UDIDs and who it’s effecting most:

Amid extra scrutiny from Congress around privacy issues, Apple this week has started rejecting apps that access UDIDs, or identification numbers that are unique to every iPhone and iPad. …

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Not only is Apple’s App Store a bigger payday for developers than the Android Market, now a Distimo study is saying Amazon’s Appstore also earns devs a bigger haul. From Gigaom:

Investment in Amazon Appstore is paying off in a big way for many top developers, a good chunk of whom are pulling in more money for their apps on Amazon than through Google’s Android Market. App analytics firm Distimo, in its latest monthly report, laid out how despite its much smaller collection of apps,  the Appstore is becoming a lucrative place for app makers to do business.

Distimo said that of the top 110 apps that appear in both the  Android Market and Amazon Appstore, 42 of them make more money on Amazon than on Android Market. Overall, 28 percent of the revenue in those top apps came from the Appstore. …

Amazon Appstore is turning out to be a great place for paid app downloads, compared to Android Market which monetizes better through in-app purchase. …

While Android Market generated 22 times more new apps than the Appstore in September last year, by December and January, the number of new apps on Amazon had surged, cutting the Market’s advantage for new apps to about 5-1.

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The recent introduction of low-end (cheaper) smartphones has hit a tiny testing snag … not all apps will work on them. Nokia and ZTE have already announced their intentions to make these “low-end” devices that will run Windows Mobile with 256MB of memory and 7X27 processors. But Microsoft recently commented that, as things stand now, 5% of existing Windows Phone apps won’t work with the new, lower system requirements. PCWorld has more info:

The company had identified 5 percent of current apps that won’t run properly on the lower end devices. Earlier in the day a Microsoft executive said there are currently 65,000 apps available in the market.

The company will contact the developers of those apps to advise them of how to make their apps compatible with the new phones, he said. He also wrote that in most cases the apps would be required to use less memory.

Developers of those apps can also decide not to make their app available to the new phones.

Read the full article at PCWorld >>>

That means that if developers want their apps for work on ALL Windows supported phones they’re going to have to backtrack and rejigger their apps. This means more testing, which means there’s going to be a demand for testers who own these low-end phones. Heads up all you niche testers out there!

Do you excuslivly test iOS apps? What about Android apps? Well Mozilla wants you to forget about OS-specific apps and focus on creating (and testing) HTML5-based cross-platform apps. It’s so dedicated to the idea in fact, that Mozilla is getting ready to launch its own app store. From TechCrunch:

 The web-friendly nonprofit has just announced their intention to launch a new cross-platform app market later this year, and the submission process is slated to start next week at Mobile World Congress.

The initiative ties into Mozilla’s focus on developing the web as a platform for rich content, and they hope to do so by providing developers with the tools needed to create great things.

“By building the missing pieces, Mozilla is now unlocking the potential of the Web to be the platform for creating and consuming content everywhere,” said Mozilla Chief of Innovation Todd Simpson.

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