Globally the average number of hours spent in a day, by people on a smartphone is around 3 hrs 40 mins.There are around 5.5 billion apps in the appstore for both android and IOS phones.The number of app downloads is expected to be around 250 billion by 2022. All these figures show the popularity of mobile phone apps and how it has become the primary medium of engaging users for businesses across the globe. But with times the demands and expectations of the users are surging and organizations are in quest of constantly seeking innovative technological solutions to meet the user expectations. Apart from bringing innovation in mobile app development, achieving quality@speed has always been challenging for mobile app developers. Mobile app industry being such a dynamic domain is in itself the major challenge and many platforms are in the market out there to solve the puzzle, while pCloudy being on the top of the game let’s have a look on the challenges faced by enterprises in app development and how pCloudy solved these challenges.
Table of Contents
Challenges faced by Enterprise Mobility
Device Fragmentation
One of the major challenges faced by mobile development organizations is to make the app multi platform support. When we talk about multi-platform it is about matching the gamut of device combinations like OS and OS versions, OS and browser versions, browser and browser versions, different screen sizes, screen aspect ratio, form factor, etc. So testing an app until it meets all the types and combinations of device variations and ensuring a ready to release app requires great time and effort. One solution is parallel testing wherein we can test multiple devices simultaneously. Here we can make use of the Appium framework for automating parallel testing. This can prove as a key solution in diluting the issue of device fragmentation. All this can be best achieved in a cloud platform and no brainer how efficiently pCloudy has solved this issue.
Achieving Scalability
Smartphones are the most popular devices in the digital ecosystem of this era, this is due to the use of mobile apps. The impact of the mobile apps has widely affected the lifestyle of the millennials and the expectation keeps on increasing. New versions of the smartphones keep on releasing every now and then. Hence developing a platform which can easily scale the increasing number of mobile devices can save the purpose. Scalability can be effortlessly achieved only in an environment that supports parallel testing and a wireless platform like cloud , where scaling can be easily achieved without messing up in infrastructural complications required in setting up a physical device lab. As mentioned earlier an Appium framework can act as a catalyst in automating parallel testing.
Progressive reports to improve quality
Reports showing the number of bugs can prove very helpful in solving the errors right from the early stages. This practice can be a noteworthy solution in gaining qualitative results for mobile app development. Getting the reports on an individual basis won’t give efficient results, hence we can get intelligent results where errors can be retrieved in bulk for a number of devices and also debugging can be done simultaneously.
In the picture below you can see the report for different builds with their start time, progress, status and action. The test case status helps you in retrieving important information like the number of tests passed and failed and according you can fix the test cases that have failed without spending time on manually going through each and every test case.
To get the reports you can integrate any reporting framework with the existing Appium setup.
Integration with AI to Speed up Mobile App Testing
One of the major challenges in mobile app development is increasing the speed of script creation as well as simplifying the script creation process. The most common practice to achieve this is by integrating an automation framework like Appium to use object repositories. On the contrary an AI based utility can help you in spotting the objects easily for the entire page So if there is a call to action button (CTA) then this utility can automatically recognize the element.
These practices help you to expedite the process of Script creation using AI.
Conclusion
To conclude, automation is the backbone of any software development process and especially when it comes to mobile applications because of the major issues like device fragmentation enveloping it. So automation is the light that can demolish the device fragmentation issues. Also other issues, whether it is solutions like scalability, progressive reports or creating a script for AI based utility, they derive their Base from automation testing which can be attained with the help of efficient frameworks like Appium. pCloudy is the cloud based platform that continues to bring the innovative technological solution to achieve quality@speed to solve various enterprise mobility issues.