The alignment of forces in the mobile platform market — The growth of competition in Google Play — Features of testing applications for Android OS
By the end of 2012, the Android operating system became the leader among mobile platforms: its share in the global market exceeded 53%, for comparison, the share of Apple’s OS is 36% (data from the analytical company comScore).
Even in the European market, where iOS has been the favorite for a long time, Android has displaced its competitors. Another achievement is more than 25 billion downloaded apps in Google Play.
These statistics demonstrate the huge potential of Google’s operating system in the mobile application market. On the one hand, Android software developers get great opportunities for growth, on the other hand, they face fierce competition and high quality requirements from users. In such circumstances, comprehensive testing of products for the Google Play app store is of particular importance.
The global share of sales of smartphones based on mobile OS in 2008-2012.
Source: Enders Analysis
Smartphones and tablets running Android have significant differences in software and hardware.
They can have a different form factor and screen resolution, use their own OS version and processor command system, provide support for the front camera, NFC, external keyboard and other modules. All this needs to be taken into account when developing applications.
Not all publishers of Google Play products can afford a large fleet of test gadgets to check the correct operation of their applications. Also, practice shows that it is difficult for developers to objectively evaluate their project, to look at it from the user’s side. For this reason, publishers involve third-party teams of testers to support the project throughout its lifecycle.
Everyone makes mistakes, both novice programmers and experienced teams of well-known companies. For example, recently an article was published in the IT community “Habrahabr” with a whole list of bugs and flaws in the application “Yandex.Metro” for Android smartphones.
Of course, no one can guarantee the correct operation of the application in 100% of cases, it’s just unrealistic. However, experts in the field of testing and usability can minimize the number of errors. The result will be a high quality software product, which significantly affects its rating and TOP positions in the Google Play store.
Developers of software products for Android OS can perform a comprehensive quality check or concentrate on individual tasks: functional, automated, load, stress or usability testing.
In some cases, development teams are trying to reduce the project budget through testing. How reasonable is this? Research testing helps to answer this question — the primary study of the functionality and quality of Android applications. The budget for such a task can range from $ 200 to $ 400. Based on its results, it will be possible to understand whether it is necessary to conduct more in-depth testing.
In any case, developers and owners of Android applications should be sure that their program will work correctly on all types of smartphones and tablets running this OS. This is one of the components of success in the Google Play market.
Author: Dmitry Kurylenko,
Head of the Testing and Quality Assurance Department
of the innovative company Promwad (www.promwad.com )