Looking for the best mobile app testing tools? Look no further – our friends from Skelia have researched 5 of them and we are ready to share the results with you

Let’s talk numbers. There are about 5,704,000 mobile apps available now in leading app stores. Take your time to comprehend the volume. For you as a mobile app tester, this means one thing: the market is enormous, so if your app is in any way faulty, users will quickly replace it with one of the tens of alternative ones. Luckily for you, we’ve prepared a list of five tools to help you with mobile app testing and making sure your apps are flawless.

 

TestRail

You know pretty well that testing requires tracking and managing tons of details and information, plus you have to show phenomenal time management skills. That’s why life gets so much easier if you use test management tools. TestRail is one of the best on the market. It is a great web-based tool for managing test cases, plans, runs and basically organizing the whole app testing lifecycle. Manual or automated, desktop or mobile application testing – regardless of the purpose, TestRail is extremely helpful. Its benefits include real-time insights, various dashboards and activity reports, seamless integration with popular tools like JIRA, Redmine, WebDriver, Selenium or Protractor and a customer support team that cares. It’s fast, intuitive, shows you all your tests and projects in one place and lets you add test cases in three clicks. If this doesn’t boost your productivity, I don’t know what will.

 

Crashlytics

Whether you like it or not, no app has avoided crashing. But the faster you learn the reasons and understand the pattern of the crash, the less damage it will cause to your app’s reputation. Crashlytics is your savior in this complicated and troublesome task. It can tell you why your app crashed an hour ago in London on a Nexus 5X belonging to a lovely brunette and how much she was upset about it. Ok, we made up the brunette part, but Crashlytics is priceless when it comes to pinpointing crashes. And it is actually priceless, as in free.

With Crashlytics, you’ll know precisely why the app crashed, down to the exact line of code that caused it, along with the number of users affected and their devices. It can also detect the number of times crashes occur and warn you if a specific crash happens too often. The tool is easy to use, has great community support and gives you meticulously detailed reports about the crashes. Enjoy.

 

Charles

We’ve all been there. You’re testing a mobile app, tapping the “Send” button… and nothing. Maybe it’s just a broken button, but it also can be a client-server or a data usage issue, which are frankly difficult to detect on mobile devices. Charles is your #1 tool for HTTP/HTTPS/SSL proxying, monitoring and, therefore, debugging.

You might think that a mobile app testing tool with a name as sophisticated as Charles is complicated and perplexing. But it is actually very handy and neat. Charles makes it easy to track, capture and analyze the traffic of your mobile apps. Just download the app, install it and set up your iOS or Android device to proxy network requests through this wonderful app. Charles is great for performance testing: it shows you all the requests and responses of your app so that you can detect the traffic bottleneck.

 

Postman

Postman is a tool that gives you everything you need to test API endpoints. It’s great for prototyping, sharing and documenting HTTP APIs too. Postman can boast a simple workflow and a user-friendly UI for creating requests and receiving responses. This great tool for API testing lets you create tests using JavaScript or Postman’s interface and organize your tests and results. The Postman App can be installed on Windows, Mac and Linux or used as a Chrome extension.

Postman comes in three packages for teams of different size. The version for individual developers is free and covers basic functions like maintaining the history of API requests, testing and sharing. The Pro and Enterprise packages are commercial and also offer collaboration, security and support options.

 

Xamarin Test Cloud

You know the feeling of disappointment when you want to thoroughly test an app but you don’t possess 2,000 of the most popular mobile devices? We don’t. All thanks to Xamarin Test Cloud – probably the best mobile device testing tool and it’s impressive collection that allows testing apps on real devices in the cloud. Simply interact with your app via Test Cloud’s interface like a user would on an actual device: pinch, swipe, tap, long-press, rotate the screen, press buttons, turn on GPS or camera, etc. This is how you find the bugs your user could encounter before the app is shipped. Profit!

iOS or Android, native or hybrid – Xamarin Test Cloud allows you to test various apps better than on an emulator. Test Cloud supports creating tests in C#, Ruby and Java, so save yourself a couple of weeks of monotonous testing by automating the process. In the end, you’ll get detailed descriptive reports with screenshots – great for analyzing performance, memory and CPU usage or detecting bottlenecks.

All in all, Xamarin Test Cloud is great for lightweight app testing, but it might not be the best option for testing resource-demanding apps since Test Cloud isn’t that good with testing hardware features.

So there you go. Mobile app testing is not a piece of cake and users are becoming even pickier, but with the right mobile app testing tools, your application will blow their socks off.

 

 

About Skelia

Skelia is a global IT services company providing software development, quality assurance, and outsourcing services. We help our European and US customers with the best IT talent of Eastern Europe. Headquartered in Europe, Skelia operates through a global network of offices in Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Poland and the United States.

Come along and visit us at Booth #13 at the UKSTAR 2017 Expo 

Authors’ bio

Tetiana Karpenko

 

Tetiana is a software testing and quality assurance guru with 10 years of experience in the field. Backend, frontend, system, integration, functional, regression testing, E2E testing – you name it! Tetiana has mastered it all. She is also a certified ScrumMaster and a Test Leader who has been managing, coaching and mentoring her team for almost 5 years now.

 

Victoria Bezsmolna

Victoria is a content geek passionate about tech and innovation. Having started her career as a technical writer, Victoria discovered that writing articles about software development and the latest gadgets is far more cool. She likes mythology, philology, raccoons and is a big Marvel fan. Really, huge fan.