According to Statista, over 31,000 apps were released on Apple’s App Store in March 2023. As impressive as that is, it’s considerably smaller than the number of apps submitted to the Apple store during the same month.
And it’s probably less than the number of apps removed from the App Store.
Why?
According to Apple, most submissions fail because of common issues like bugs, crashes, incompleteness, placeholder data and broken links.
But getting app approval is just one of many challenges faced by iOS developers today.
Contemporary iOS App User Expectations
The truth is, even if you slip by Apple, there’s an even greater critic to be concerned about: Your audience. Users are much less forgiving and have high expectations. If your app isn’t perfect, you’ll lose your chance at meaningful adoption and your users will just go elsewhere.
For iOS users, perfect is simply the status quo, and users have grown to expect it. In practice, this means that apps must be stable across devices and versions, see regular improvements. and provide a great user experience at all times.
Seamless experience between devices, versions and iterations
iOS users expect the same experience across multiple devices. From one iPhone to the next, from version to version and from screen size to screen size. It’s the responsibility of developers to prioritize a consistent experience across devices.
Fast release cycles and regular updates
Contemporary app users demand feature-rich applications that go above and beyond the simple functions they expect from an app. Given the statistics above, chances are that the competition is fierce. Achieving success usually requires an efficient and speedy release cycle with more planning, more deployments and more testing.
Easy and frictionless user experience
User experience (UX) and functionality are one of the big reasons iOS adoption is so strong. People have come to expect high quality from anything under the Apple banner: Users expect an intuitive and trouble-free user experience on every app with which they interact. Every user’s experience needs to be intuitive, issue free and consistent with other iOS applications.
Challenges Abound
Meeting those escalating user expectations comes with a wide variety of challenges. For example:
Device landscape fragmentation
With so many device types and form factors in circulation, how do you test across all of them? With dozens of iterations of the iPhone combined with an array of versions, screen sizes and configurations, app developers need a way to test on enough devices to cover the majority of their user bases.
This leads many developers to turn to simulators and emulators to cover devices they lack access to.
This poses another problem. Simulators aren’t perfect. A simulator doesn’t replicate the functions of the actual device; it can only mimic certain aspects of an iOS device. And it simply can’t effectively mimic hardware, component functionality or network.
Using a simulator, you can’t test how an application will respond to factors like low battery, a rising network spike, or limited memory, not to mention GPS and camera functionality. You also can’t monitor usage metrics or run meaningful performance tests.
Real devices present their own challenge. The vast majority of the time, developers will have to worry about the cost of acquiring, storing, maintaining and updating devices. In addition, they’ll have to centralize and control access to them. In an increasingly remote workforce, it’s not a great strategy.
Manual tests
Today, most organizations are over-reliant on manual testing. The result? Running test cases becomes the bottleneck that holds up releases. Sure, manual testing is unavoidable in some cases, but their ad-hoc, inconsistent nature leaves room for error. No matter how detailed the instructions may be, people test differently, and that’s a disaster waiting to happen in today’s complex software world.
Maintaining complex test scripts
If you’re automating test cases, you’ve experienced the pain of maintaining code-based test scripts. Every release requires coinciding updates to countless unit tests, integration tests and UI tests. The smallest changes can break test cases, causing false negatives and more deployment delays.
On top of that, you’ve also got to worry about retaining talent that understands your language-specific testing framework. Given the economic uncertainties of today, that’s certainly not a good situation to be in.
Constant iOS updates
Each year sees Apple deliver iOS major releases and a variety of minor releases, patches and bug fixes. Organizations have to test after two release cycles: Their own and Apple’s. Failure to do so can lead to compatibility and App Store compliance issues.
App store guidelines
As I mentioned above, Apple maintains strict guidelines for any apps published on the App Store. Excellent testing can mean the difference between releasing an app or waiting another few weeks for the next approval. When time is money, this adds up fast.
Security at scale
As requirements change, scope increases and features add up, it’s easy to see how it can become more and more challenging to monitor for potential security flaws. In turn, testing needs to be continually updated to reflect the latest security risks.
A Shift Toward Scriptless Solutions
Scriptless automation is part of a growing industry of no-code automation tools, often dubbed the no-code revolution. It’s everything test automation is without the reliance on code-based frameworks.
Scriptless test automation involves recording user interactions with app elements, asserting expected outcomes and assessing the results. The test is then automated, templatized and extended to test other scenarios.
With scriptless test automation, you can walk through test cases step by step. Some tools even allow you to test on live devices and choose from real iOS devices that are hosted in the cloud.
Scriptless testing allows you to:
● Easily reuse and templatize test scripts. Scriptless automation makes it easier to reuse test cases, create templates and compose new test cases.
● Enable faster time to value. Write test cases quicker, make changes without knowing how to write code and integrate directly with your CI/CD tool. As soon as you make changes to your application, your testing team is right there. Some no-code testing tools can analyze your source code and identify testing gaps so that you can address them right away.
● Untangle the web of code-based dependencies. With scriptless iOS test automation, testers don’t have to lift and shift their code every time they make a big change. Instead, the no-code framework provides a visual, easily-navigated UI that tells you simply what’s passing, what’s failing and what needs to be updated.
● Improve collaboration between teams. Scriptless iOS test automation improves collaboration between testers and developers by making it easy for all teams to visualize test cases.
Real Device Testing
When the pain points of fragmentation meet the shortcomings of simulation, developers are wise to test on real devices. At the end of the day, live device testing is the only way to accurately capture an end user’s experience.
Yet it’s no secret that managing your own device lab is expensive and unrealistic for modern remote work environments. A real device cloud setup solves this problem: A device cloud hosts devices for you that you can access from your desktop, from anywhere.
Given the ever-increasing complications of today’s mobile app landscape and the incredibly cut-throat mobile app landscape, it’s worth keeping in mind that you may only get one chance at making the right impression on your audience. Getting testing right is the key.
Into the Future
Everyone expects more. As a competitive organization, you have to do more with less: Fewer resources, less time and less room for error. Scriptless automation and real device testing won’t guarantee that your app stands out from the crowd, but it will certainly help.
