Analytics & TestingMobile and Tablet Marketing

TestFlight: iOS Beta Testing and Live App Monitoring

Mobile application testing is a critical step in every mobile application deployment. While successful mobile applications have incredible engagement and provide immense value to consumers and businesses alike, a buggy mobile application isn’t just a disaster that you can easily fix.

Deployment of a broken app or an app with poor usability will plummet adoption, skyrocket poor reviews… and then when you actually do fix the app, you’re behind the eightball.

Within the Apple realm of application development, including iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple Watch, and Apple TV, the solution for beta testing and capturing bugs and user experience issues is Testflight.

Apple Testflight

Testflight is a beta application deployment platform where you can invite users to test your applications. This enables your team to identify bugs and collect valuable feedback before releasing your apps on the App Store. With Testflight, you can invite up to 10,000 testers using just their email address or by sharing a public link.

A Checklist for Mobile Application Testing

There are a number of issues that can be identified with Mobile Application testing that you should consider:

  1. Compatibility – Screen resolutions, display issues with landscape and portrait modes, operating system versions can all impact how well your application functions.
  2. Permissions – Do you have permissions properly set and configured to access phone features (files, camera, accelerometer, wireless, wifi, bluetooth, etc.)
  3. Bandwidth – Most apps are integrated with the cloud, so you’re going to want to ensure low bandwidth doesn’t impact the application performance… or at least let the user know that there may be degraded performance. You may want to find users that only have 2G connections all the way to 5G.
  4. Scalability – Many an application launch and have an impressive marketing campaign around it for deployment. Everyone signs up and the application crashes as your integrated servers can’t take the pressure. Load testing and your ability to scale and resolve stress issues is critical.
  5. Usability
    – Write out user stories on how you believe users should interact with your application and then observe how they actually interact. Screen recording is a great way to identify where confusion may be and how you may have to reconfigure elements to ensure intuitive use.
  6. Analytics – Are you fully integrated with a mobile analytics SDK to monitor your app engagement from one end to the other? You need that – not just for usability, but also to incorporate any customer journey monitoring and conversion metrics.
  7. Localization – How does your application work in different geographic locations and with different languages set on the device?
  8. Notifications – Have you tested in-app notifications to ensure they work, can be configured properly, and can be tracked?
  9. Recovery – If (and when) your application crashes or breaks, are you capturing the data? Can the user recover from the crash without issues? Can they report issues?
  10. Compliance – Is your mobile application secure, all of its endpoints secure, and fully compliant with all regulatory requirements before you go live? While you’re beta testing it, you want to be sure.

Investing more time on testing will ensure a successful mobile application launch. Testflight is an essential tool in the Apple ecosystem to ensure your application is working properly, dependencies properly coded, and your application will gain faster adoption and widespread use by your target audience.

Apple Developer Testflight

Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is CMO of OpenINSIGHTS and the founder of the Martech Zone. Douglas has helped dozens of successful MarTech startups, has assisted in the due diligence of over $5 bil in Martech acquisitions and investments, and continues to assist companies in implementing and automating their sales and marketing strategies. Douglas is an internationally recognized digital transformation and MarTech expert and speaker. Douglas is also a published author of a Dummie's guide and a business leadership book.

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