It only takes one bug to seriously hurt your mobile app’s growth and retention.
Mobile users are infamously fickle, and a single bug is often all it takes for users to uninstall your app and replace it with a competitor. Data shows that most apps lose more than 95% of all daily active users (DAUs) within 30 days, often due to performance and stability issues.
Worse yet, bad performance and bugs can lead to bad reviews, which hurt your ability to grow your app’s user base in the future.
Since bugs can have such a huge effect on your ability to earn and retain users, it’s vital that you develop a QA methodology that lets you detect and fix quality issues before you release each version of your mobile application.
Below, we’ve put together a three-step plan to help you assemble a consistent QA methodology using MyCrowd on-demand QA testing.
Stop using emulators
One of the best ways to speed up your testing process is through the use of emulators. Mobile device emulators let you test on hardware you don’t actually own, like an outdated smartphone or a specific tablet.
The downside of emulators is that they’re a simulation of hardware, not the real deal. As such, a lot of bugs that occur only on authentic hardware don’t occur on emulators. The opposite is also true — emulators can trigger bugs that don’t occur on real hardware, creating false positives.
While emulators do have a place in QA testing, they’re far from ideal if your goal is consistency in your QA testing. Our crowdtesting platform is built around real users and real devices, which lets us accurately locate bugs that emulators can’t reveal.
Build QA into every release
Every release — from the launch of a new, high-profile application to a minor update — needs a careful QA process. Take a guess at how many bugs your app has and you could end up with serious negative feedback from your users, hurting your ability to grow your audience.
It’s important that you build quality assurance into every release, with a bug testing process for every release of every application. This is especially important if you’re developing an app for a large, established brand for which negative reviews could be very damaging.
Our QA testing platform is built to make integrating QA into your release process as simple and affordable as possible. Since you only pay when our testers find bugs, testing your app at each stage of the release process is a refreshingly inexpensive process.
Use exploratory testing
As you prepare to launch your mobile app, it’s tempting to plan QA testing around the processes you expect your users to follow. As a result, the most used parts of your app are tested and free of bugs, while other, less used parts of your app aren’t as thoroughly tested.
This can lead to a smooth experience for users that stay within the lines and use your app as you expect them to, and a buggy, frustrating experience for users that spend more time using your app and go down paths you haven’t completely tested.
Exploratory testing is a hands-on approach in which testers hunt for bugs within your app. Since it doesn’t follow the usual “rules” of testing, it’s an effective way to discover bugs that usually go unnoticed due to a limited QA testing methodology.
Let us catch your bugs before your customers do. With our exploratory testing, you can use the power of our crowdtesting team to thoroughly scan your app for bugs before release, stopping bad reviews and frustrated users from impacting its growth.
QA test your mobile app or website now
MyCrowd QA is built to make QA testing your mobile app or website as quick, simple and affordable as possible. Learn more about our crowdtesting platform and start your first QA testing project to bug test your app on a huge range of mobile platforms and devices before its release.
