Testing mobile apps

Oleg Kurnosov
Flatstack Thoughts
Published in
2 min readJan 19, 2017

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Alright, it seems now there are apps that test apps…Pretty weird huh?

The reason why they appear — is that manual QA tapping through apps, or automated tools like Crashlytics (that is part of Fabric now) or GoogleAnalytics don’t cover the whole variety of bugs that are out there.

bug: screen freeze when scroll — debug env wasn’t turned off on stage

One of the most recent examples: we’ve been releasing new #ios version for BrightSide mobile app that we developed at Flatstack. We found that it was freezing due to some ads & statistics weren’t working due to debug mode was turn on stage.

That wasn’t happening all the time as we’d notice otherwise that due to some human error there is bug.

Bugs always happen to the best of us, period. Just admit it start tracking it, adjust workflow to track such and be more on the user side.

So we found it and we fixed it. However the whole question — is how you actually track it?

Now we’re going to use following to automatically randomly look for bugs in apps:

#android monkey testing: https://developer.android.com/studio/test/monkeyrunner/index.html

#ios monkey testing: https://github.com/jonathanpenn/ui-auto-monkey (turn on translation in browser to read more instructions on it https://jzchangmark.wordpress.com/2015/10/16/ios-ui-monkey-test/)

And once again, bugs still will be out there, they will happen, no-matter how many tools you use to track and how hard you do testing. There is always room for perfection. E.g. in the Brightside #ios mobile app it’s 99+% crash-free target we’re following.

Dream crash-free target

P.S. My personal recommendation to build software that is friendly & not glitchy in addition to all the complex testing - just use it urself daily. Especially if software is created for ordinary people. If you like it — other people will do too :) If you want help with ur mobile app, drop a note.

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rubyonrails, ios, android apps. legal(ru) & financial(ru) consultant.@flatstack, @launchpad (ru), Happy Dad of 2.