Anna Thorsen
Consumer behavior has radically changed. People want goods and services at the touch of a button. One slight mistake, an unexpected app crash, or a critical bug can lead to disastrous consequences.
This has a knock-on effect on the customer, and on the revenue of your business.
Key example: the major Facebook (Meta) outage in late 2021. It cost them $47 billion.
Native mobile applications aren’t just used by consumers though. They are used by business people in their day-to-day work.
Ensuring that apps are running as they should has become an important part of end-to-end testing.
So how does automation fit into this equation? And why is it important to automate testing on native mobile?
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2 reasons why mobile app automated testing is important
What test automation can help you achieve
2 reasons why mobile app automated testing is important
If an application stops working, it can disrupt a business's operations.
And when you are already mired down by testing your IT infrastructure end-to-end, adding mobile app testing to your regression suite just adds to this burden.
Automation, while not always easy to adopt, is how businesses can remain agile in their development process, and ensure that their processes are working end-to-end, whether it’s on a desktop, in a browser, or on a native mobile device.
Why is test automation just as important on mobile?
1. Keeping your customers and employees happy. If a bug prevents your app from functioning, you lose business, and you lose revenue (if an app doesn’t meet expectations, 80% of customers delete or uninstall it).
If you’re an employee who’s dependent on using an app to do your job (like a delivery driver), a broken app stops you from doing your job.
Automation can help you see in the dark so that you can catch the bugs you may not have seen when manually testing. It also speeds up the process of testing, so you can test more with less.
2. Manual testing is too slow. Regression testing is non-negotiable. But doing this process manually can quickly become a burden on your team.
It’s dull and repetitive, and it’s very prone to human error.
This makes it difficult for businesses to test quickly and thoroughly. A compromise has to be made between speed and quality. When push comes to shove, quality gets sacrificed.
So what can automated testing of native mobile apps help you achieve?
What test automation can help you achieve
Minimize downtime. Get better coverage of your tech stack, and of the most high-risk areas. You’ll be better equipped to catch bugs before they make it to a live environment.
Happier customers. The quality of your application will improve if you catch bugs faster. This leads to higher customer satisfaction and retention. You’ll keep people coming back.
A productive, happier workforce. Enable business people to do their jobs. By automating, you’re helping your employees work on what they care about most.
Stronger brand. By improving the productivity of your workforce, you’ll be better equipped to get new features to the market faster. You’ll have higher-quality apps that meet the needs of your customers and the business.
Outsmart competitors. Automating your testing gives you a competitive advantage. You can meet the demand for testing, and you can release faster. Speed over quality won’t become a compromise. This, of course, also depends on the type of test automation you adopt.
Related reading: How to Automate Mobile App Testing - 2 Approaches
So how can you achieve these perks with test automation? We cover this in detail in our guide to Mobile App Testing with Test Automation.
