KIFSU and the Mobile User Expectations

The user expectations of a mobile app is one of the main speciality and main challenge for mobile teams. The fact that every user has unique expectations makes it so difficult to develop and deliver the “right” app to customers. As several reports and surveys show, mobile users have far higher expectations of mobile apps when compared to other software like browser applications. The majority of reports and surveys state that nearly 80% of users delete an app after using it for the first time! The top four reasons for deletion are always bad design and usability, loading time and crashes immediately after installation.
Nearly 60% of users will delete an app that requires registration, while more than half of users expect an app to launch in under two seconds. If the app needs more time it gets deleted. Again more than half of users experience crashes the very first time they start an app.

An average user checks his mobile device every six minutes and has around 40 apps installed. Based on those numbers you can deduce that mobile users have really high expectations when it comes to usability, performance and reliability. Those three points are by far the biggest complaints when mobile users were asked about their experience with mobile apps.

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How to improve your mobile testing skills

In the last couple of months I was asked by several people how I improve my mobile testing skills. The mobile world is changing quite fast and you have to keep the pace, if you want to be a good and up to date mobile tester.

I recommended to read lots of QA related blogs, read QA books, follow the right people on twitter, try new mobile testing tools at home or at work (if you have the time) to get a broader knowledge in the mobile area. Another thing I recommended was to do new things (be creative while testing), try new testing techniques or just try to break the app in a crazy way. Furthermore I recommended another way of improve the own skills. Use as many apps as possible from different categories to see how apps are developed and how they behave. Besides using them, the important thing is, check the update texts of the apps! Do not just install the latest version of the app, read before installing the app. Some app developers are really precise in what the new version of the app is all about. Which nasty bug was fixed, which new feature is developed and so on.
If there are bug fixes described, don’t install the new version, instead try to reproduce the bug and see how to get this bug to life!

Here are some examples of apps that descibed very well, what was fixed:

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How Netflix test on Android

I found a really nice blogpost on the netflix blog. They describe how they test their app on different Android devices using AndroidNativeDriver and Selenium. When Netflix decided to enter the Android ecosystem, we faced a daunting set of challenges: a) We wanted to release rapidly every 6-8 weeks, b) There were hundreds of Android … Read more

Robotium 3.0 is out there!

Since November 16th the latest version of Robotium 3.0 is released. This new version of Robotium provides several new and improved methods to test your Android app. As Renas Reda in the jayway blog says: “Robotium is now faster, lighter and more stable then ever!” I hope that is true because the previous versions of Robotium were really slow in the execution, even on real devices. So let’s see what’s new!

The following two methods are new to wait for views:

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