The best performance testing tools for mobile applications are a combination of various test automation tools and best practices. This article represents a compilation of our research and experiences running numerous performance tests on mobile applications from over 20 different public companies.
Mobile applications play an increasingly important role in the world of business and communications. A mobile application with poor performance can drive customers and employees away in droves. Poor performance can be caused by a variety of factors, including poorly written code or incompatible hardware. Using the best performance testing tools is one way to find out if your mobile applications are performing adequately.
Akamai CloudTest
CloudTest is an integrated load testing tool which provides website verification and mobile app performance through user-based testing. It’s a useful performance testing solution for businesses of all sizes that helps with global load assessment, simulation of large events, precision control, visual test creation, customizable dashboards, & more.
Highlighted Features
- Shift-left testing: Plug into continuous integration (CI) tools for automated “shift-left” testing
- Elastic, Globally Distributed Environment: Accurately test your infrastructure with geographically dispersed loads. Its Global Test Cloud generates realistic production volume from locations that represent your actual user base.
- Visual Test Creation: Object-based scripting allows you to insert conditionals and loops; nest actions; set parameters, variables, and validations; and reuse and combine tests — all without code.
- Visual Playback Editor: Drag and drop test cases into tracks to be executed on various cloud or on-premise locations. Configure virtual users, geographic origin, repeats, ramp-ups, and pacing with just a few clicks.
- Customizable Dashboards: Use built-in dashboards, or quickly customize your own using a drag-and-drop interface to see what’s important to you. Merge analytics, including third-party data from monitoring tools, for a single view of performance.
Pricing
Paid plan only. Contact vendor for pricing.
Apica LoadTest
Test the scalability of all your applications, identify performance bottlenecks, and deliver remarkable customer experiences that transcend the ever-growing expectations of your end-users. Apica LoadTest supports a wide range of applications and devices — from legacy apps, e-commerce sites, and video streaming to mobile apps and IoT.
Highlighted Features
- Simulate real-world user behavior: from around the world, including mainland China, and test high-traffic applications with confidence using a website stress test.
- Advanced scripting tool: Easily create scripts for complex app load testing scenarios with the scripting tool without writing any code. Build scripts for any device by record/replay or enter transactions manually.
- Troubleshooting: Discover how your application responds to various loads with a load test and identify performance bottlenecks before they cause damage in production. Compare every release against benchmarks and ensure your digital service stands up to your scalability requirements.
- Integrations: Integrates out-of-the-box with several technologies, offering a very high degree of flexibility. It offers native integration with New Relic and AppDynamics
Pricing
Apica LoadTest offers a free trial. Contact vendor for pricing.
Apptim
Apptim empowers mobile developers, testers, and managers to easily test their native apps and analyze client-side performance to prevent any critical issues from going live. Measure app render times, power consumption, resource usage, capture crashes, and more on Android and iOS devices.
Highlighted Features
- Native App Testing: Apptim evaluates the performance of native Android and iOS mobile apps while running them on real devices.
- Performance and Bug Reports: After each test session, the tool generates a report with the performance metrics and bugs that you may find during your test session with Apptim.
- JIRA Integration: Publish and track bugs directly in this project management tool.
- Easy to Use: Apptim’s user interface is elegant and intuitive, making it a simple tool to use. Also, on the website, you can find detailed documentation that will help you through your first steps with the tool and you have support available every step of the way.
- Compare Two Test Sessions: If you repeat a test for a particular feature once a new version of your app is ready, you can compare the results to see if there are any big differences in the performance.
- Supports Appium Test Automation: Run your Appium tests and capture performance metrics while using Apptim and integrate with any CI server.
Pricing
Apptim has free and paid plans that also come with free trials.
TestComplete Mobile
- With TestComplete, you can create and run repeatable and robust UI tests across native or hybrid mobile apps.TestComplete comes with support for Android and iOS devices.
- Automate your UI tests on real mobile devices, virtual machines, or emulators. With TestComplete, there is no need to jailbreak your phone or tablet.
- Use script-free record and replay actions to create automated test scripts or choose from programming languages such as Python, VBScript, JScript, or JavaScript.
21 – AI Test Creation and Analytics for iOS and Android
21 is a sophisticated, self-learning test automation and analytics platform for iOS and Android applications.
21 offers:
- Fast and intelligent authoring – AI-assisted authoring empowers users to create automated functional and UI tests in under 5 minutes.
- Results you trust – Seamless algorithmic locators system ensures stable results across all frameworks. No locators needed.
- Eliminate maintenance and flaky results – self-learning maintenance autonomously updates tests and assures your team can focus on developing new features while relying on test results.
- Release with confidence – Production integration uncovers the data needed to close the feedback loop, analyze actual coverage, and point to areas in the app that will maximize your ROI. Use data when releasing.
21 is fully SaaS, requires no installation or devices to create or execute tests. It offers access to dozens of devices seamlessly.
Kobiton (iOS And Android Device Cloud)
- Kobiton is a mobile device cloud platform that provides access to real devices to run manual and automated tests on native, web, and hybrid Android/iOS apps
- Built on top of the Appium open-source framework
- Continuously adding the latest hardware and OS updates to the device lab
- Test across devices without script modifications
- Automatically generated activity logs, commands, screenshots, and metadata allow for faster identification of issues
- Prepaid minutes of testing time that never expire.
TestProject
TestProject is the world’s first free cloud-based, a community-powered test automation platform that enables users to test Web, Android and iOS applications on all operating systems, effortlessly. Easily collaborate with your team using Selenium and Appium to ensure quality with speed. Use advanced built-in recording capabilities, create and use addons (automation actions shared by the entire community), or develop coded tests using TestProject’s powerful SDK, all completely for FREE!
- No complex setups or configurations
- No coding skills required to get started
- Share and reuse addons with your team and the entire community
- Detailed report dashboards
- Seamless integrations with your CI/CD workflow
Conclusion
Performance testing is the most important aspect to ensuring your app will have no bugs or major performance issues once released. It can be difficult to test considering you need to have all of the right equipment, which is expensive. Thus, people do not always take performance seriously. I’ve created a list of what I find to be some of the best tools to use for performance testing mobile applications. Maybe one of these tools can help you to create a more robust application that will run smoothly on all devices.