This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Mobile Devices
Before you continue reading, pick up your mobile device and look at it. Take your device in your hand and look at every side of it without turning it on. What do you see?
You will most likely see a device with a touch-sensitive screen, a device with several hardware buttons with a charger, a headphone connection, and a camera. That’s probably it—you’re not likely to have more than five hardware buttons (except for smartphones with a physical keyboard).
In an era when the words cell phone have become synonymous with smartphone, it’s important to remember that there used to be other types of cell phones, so-called dumb phones and feature phones that have lots more hardware buttons for making a call or typing a message. With a conventional dumb phone you are only able to make a call, type a message, or store a contact list; they’re not usually connected to the Internet. The more advanced ones, the feature phones, have games, a calendar, or a very basic Web browser with the option to connect to the Internet. But all these phones are really basic in terms of functionality and expandability as users aren’t able to install apps or easily update the software to a newer version, if it all. Both types of phones are still available, especially in emerging markets, but since 2013 more smartphones have been sold worldwide than dumb phones or feature phones,3 and this trend is likely to continue as time goes on. In fact, in the next couple of years dumb phones and feature phones will be a thing of the past.
The phones we use nowadays are completely different from the “old” ones. Current smartphones are mini supercomputers with lots of functionality in terms of hardware and software. They’re packed with various sensors such as brightness, proximity, acceleration, tilt, and much more. Besides that, all modern smartphones have both front- and rear-facing cameras, various communication interfaces such as Bluetooth, near field communication (NFC), and Global Positioning System (GPS), as well as Wi-Fi and cellular networks to connect to the Internet. Depending on the mobile platform and mobile manufacturer, you may find an array of other hardware features.
From a software point of view, smartphones offer lots of application programming interfaces (APIs) for manufacturers, developers, and users to extend smartphone capabilities with apps.
If you just focus on the major mobile platforms, iOS and Android, there are plenty of hardware and software combinations that mobile testers have to deal with. The fact that there are so many combinations is known as fragmentation. Mobile device fragmentation is a huge topic and yet another challenge when it comes to mobile testing.
You can’t test your app with every possible hardware and software combination. And the fact that you should test your app in a real environment makes it even more impossible. Mobile testers need to find a strategy to downsize the effort of testing on different devices and to find a way to test on the right devices.
But how can that be accomplished? By testing on just one mobile platform? By testing on just the latest device? By testing with just the latest software version?
Before you define a strategy, you should keep in mind that every app is unique, has unique requirements, has other problems to solve, and has a unique user base. With these points in mind, you can ask yourself the following questions to find the “right” mobile devices for testing:
- Who is my user base?
- How old is the average user?
- How many men or women are in my target user group?
- Which platform is used most among that user base?
- Which device is used most?
- Which software version is installed on most of the phones?
- What kind of sensors does my app use?
- How does the app communicate with the outside world?
- What is my app’s main use case?
Of course, there are lots more questions to ask, but if you answer most of the ones I suggest, the list of possible devices you should consider testing is much shorter.
In later chapters I will describe other techniques for selecting the right devices for mobile testing.