Unfortunately, performance-related problems are quite common in software development. In particular, many mobile and desktop applications could have slow start. In this article I am going to share some tips on how to identify and fix the problems of slow rendering in iOS apps.
It’s a challenge for every mobile team to get their app noticed in the middle of the 2.46 million apps on the Google Play store and 1.96 million apps on the App Store. It is an equally huge challenge to retain your users after they do download your app. Qualitest reports that 88% of app users will abandon apps based on bugs and glitches. The need for quality performing apps has never been higher with the abundance of apps available. Also, the more popular your app gets the more stress is put on the system and will likely cause issues with performance. This is why you need to stay ahead of issues by using top load testing tools for your mobile applications and ensuring that you’re delivering the quality that your users deserve.
We at Instabug know the importance of quality assurance so we compiled a list of the top performance testing tools for mobile apps.
Top load testing tools for mobile applications
WebLOAD
WebLOAD is one of the top tools to help you handle performance testing your systems. While normally for web platforms, WebLOAD integrates with Perfecto Mobile and lets you run realistic mobile performance testing to accurately evaluate the mobile user experience while the system is presented with load conditions. You can measure the response time and availability of key transactions inside a mobile application under simulated real-world conditions including backend server load, network conditions and specific mobile device.
Pricing: Pricing is undisclosed but there is a free trial available to test out the product.
LoadUI Pro
LoadUI Pro lets you conduct rapid and comprehensive performance testing for SOAP and REST APIs. Altering test speed and scalability of new changes to APIs can be done in minutes, as well as preview API performance behaviors before releasing to production environments.
Pricing: Pricing starts at €5,327/year and includes a free trial.
Apica LoadTest
Apica LoadTest is designed to help enterprises ensure the scalability of websites, apps, APIs and IoT. By load testing application performance your team can find performance bottlenecks before they become huge issues during traffic spikes.
Pricing: There is no information on the price but you can schedule a demo with the team.
CloudTest
CloudTest lets you stress test your app’s environment to ensure that you’re ready for any sudden spikes in traffic. Their team of engineers can help you design your test at any scale or stage of production and interpret the results. You’ll see what the performance problems are and where they originate, so you can fix them before they affect customers.
Pricing: There is no information on the price but you can schedule a demo with the team.
LoadRunner
LoadRunner supports a wide range of apps. It helps you drastically reduce the amount of time and skill required to simulate user transactions in load testing software. And with integrations with a lot of different IDEs and support for testing scripts it allows for continuous testing. LoadRunner also helps you identify performance bottlenecks by using seamless integrated real-time performance monitors.
Pricing: Pricing is dependent on virtual users. With a free version for up to 50 virtual users and there is an option of $1.40 per virtual user day.
WAPT
WAPT doesn’t need a whole lot of QA experience and wide technical background to start running test loading scripts. At the same time, it provides the functionality sufficient to test mobile applications and any server component accessible over HTTP. There is also the option of WAPT Pro that offers a higher scale and more integrations and features.
Pricing: Starts at $700 for WAPT and $1200 for WAPT Pro.
NeoLoad
NeoLoad is a great straight out of the box option for mobile load testing and even for IoT use cases. You can quickly and efficiently create tests that accurately represent your real users regarding network conditions, specific devices, and geographic locations. You will be able to record any native or otherwise mobile app direct recording from any device or emulator.
Pricing: Starts at a free version and there are three more paid packages depending on the number of virtual users.
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Mobile users have high performance expectations, whether using a mobile application or accessing a website from a mobile browser. The mobile app marketplaces are filled with competitive offerings; if you want a spot on a customer’s smartphone, you have to earn it.
At the same time, you cannot afford to spend months and millions of dollars testing mobile apps before you deploy them. There are too many competitors and the market is growing far too quickly for you to sit on the sidelines; if you’ve yet to join the mobile app playing field, you’re missing out on spreading your services to millions upon millions of potential customers.
Gartner, a company which deals with technology research for global business leaders, predicted years ago that mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common web access device worldwide by 2013. Well, in today’s society, we can see that their prediction was very much spot-on. With mobile web usage growing at such an unprecedented rate, it is imperative that your mobile applications meet the performance and scalability expectations of consumers.
Mobile users have high performance expectations, whether using a mobile application or accessing a website from a mobile browser. According to Equation Research, 58% of mobile users expect sites to load roughly as quickly on their mobile phones as on their desktops at home.
Sluggish performance, errors, or crashes will send many users to a competitor, and may affect their willingness to do business with you at all, even from fixed workstations. The mobile app marketplaces are filled with competitive offerings; if you want a spot on a customer’s smartphone, you have to earn it.
At the same time, you cannot afford to spend months and millions of dollars testing mobile apps before you deploy them. There are too many competitors and the market is growing far too quickly for you to sit on the sidelines; if you’ve yet to join the mobile app playing field, you’re missing out on spreading your services to millions upon millions of potential customers.
In this article, we will look at some of the common issues, challenges, and strategies to tackle performance testing on mobile applications.
Common mobile performance testing issues
Server Side:
- Variation of response time
- Stream resource-intensive multimedia packets
- Delays/drops in delivery of message/mails
- Application crash
- Inefficient use of resources
Client Side:
- Application behaves differently on various platforms and handsets
- High memory and CPU consumption
- Mobile application too slow to load
- Application causing battery drain out
Challenges:
- Prevalence of customer protocols
- Rapid scalability
- Lack of mobile monitoring solutions
- Lack of diagnostic tools
- Time to market
- Selection of load testing tool
- Test environment
- High concurrency
Mobile performance test strategies
Test in production environment
With the complexity of today’s web infrastructure and mobile users scattered around the globe, extrapolating performance based on a limited lab test is dangerous. Testing in the lab or a staging environment is helpful, but is unlikely to reveal the performance and reliability problems that appear in production at scale.
To really test the performance of your mobile application, you have to extend your testing efforts beyond the application itself to the actual production environment. Only by testing in the production infrastructure can you take into account all of the components of your application including those outside the application itself. Production testing does not necessarily mean putting your production application at risk. There are ways to test in the production environment that limit your exposure. For example:
- Test during maintenance window
- Test in production but before the product is announced/released
- Test on slice of the production infrastructure
Test for 2-3 times expected capacity
No one is really good at predicting peak loads- we’re all just guessing. Even companies that have been in the business for years and have history to look back on make the mistake of assuming that past performance predicts the future. That’s a dangerous assumption in today’s online world. With the help of Twitter, Facebook and many other social networking sites, words can be spread quicker than you can imagine.
Because of this uncertainty, it is recommended that you estimate your peak traffic, and then test at two to three times that peak capacity. Testing at scale like this gives you confidence that your application infrastructure can handle an unexpected load without melting down.
Test accurately for the mobile environment
Make sure that your performance tests can model the actual behavior and environment of your mobile users. In the diverse mobile application environment, you need to be able to accurately reflect the user environment, including web services calls from games or other apps as well as mobile browsers. For mobile web pages, testing should include multiple mobile platforms, including Blackberry devices, Android, iOS, WebOS, and Windows Mobile.
Once you have created accurate scripts from different mobile devices and user behavior profiles, you can then combine, parameterize or manipulate them to create the complex usage patterns and high traffic volumes needed for an accurate load test.
Ideally, you should be able to correlate end user performance on real mobile devices with performance metrics from your supporting backend infrastructure, to discover how infrastructure issues impact the end user performance.
Test across geographies
By definition, mobile users don’t stay in one place, and the Internet defies geographical borders; therefore, it is important to test across geographies for global reach. Send traffic from different parts of the country, over different Internet backbones, and from different countries and continents. Make sure that the application performs consistently and reliably across the entire infrastructure.
Test with real time results
Engineers generally will use “mean time to failure” to predict the required maintenance cycle for an application. By estimating the number of transactions per minute, hour, or day for the application, you can extrapolate the number of transactions for a week or a month. The application should then be brought to a high but stable load rate. The site is then allowed to run indefinitely, and the total transactions are recorded. From that number, you can predict how long the site will run given normal conditions.
With fast-moving development cycles and rapid mobile adoption cycles, you cannot take weeks or months to test. You need to see results in real time, so you can make changes on the fly and test those changes as part of an iterative performance test. An example of this is when the site is placed under increasing load levels until a bottleneck is reached (site becomes non-responsive due to a downstream dependency). That bottleneck should then be fixed, either by fixing the code or by scaling up or out.
Conclusion
Testing Mobile Applications is a tedious process and performance testing cannot be done without the help of tools. Tools like Charles Proxy, Fiddler, Soasta, JMeter etc can help testers not only to identify performance bottlenecks but also to monitor their distribution across different layers of an application. The idea behind writing this article is to provide you access to some well-known tools that can be used for mobile applications’ performance testing.
Mobile apps and sites for the Android platform has been growing rapidly. The diversity of mobile platforms is rising and so are the demand for applications. However, designing, developing and testing these applications is highly complex process. Mobile application performance may be dependent on many factors. We have collected some of the best tools that analyzes your mobile app performance by just adding a simple line of script tag in your application.