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How to Choose Mobile Devices for Testing?

how to choose mobile devices for testing
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How to Choose Mobile Devices for Testing?​

There are a plethora of mobile devices available differing in OS versions, screen resolutions, or device models. Let’s take the example of Android OS for better comprehension. Thousands of devices run on the Android operating system. Again, on a single device model, different versions of the Android OS might run.

Test engineers, involved in mobile app testing, understand the complexity that different platforms and configurations may cause. Things that work perfectly on one device may break down suddenly and spectacularly on another one.

Now the question is how do we create a solid cross-device mobile test strategy? We’ll explore that in the article. Keep reading!

How to Create a Cross-Device Mobile Testing Strategy?

  1. To execute this, we need to make use of global or private statistics. The easiest way to choose mobile devices for testing is to find out the most used devices from the private analytics system(amplitude, firebase etc.)
  2. Another parameter for selecting the mobile devices would be their RAM size. Most of the low-end devices with a low RAM size are slower than the other devices. Also, these devices are more prone to a memory leak. Therefore, it is suggested to test your application on low-end devices as well.
  3. Another way is to select devices with custom configurations to ensure maximum coverage. The most used categories to choose the devices for testing are OS Version and Screen Resolution(specifically, width). In the next section, we will elaborate on this.

Selecting Devices with Custom Configurations

Note that the exercise outlined here is conducted on Android devices. The same can be performed for iOS as well.

  • OS Version

Based on the above-mentioned data, we should select the devices with OS versions 12, 11 and 10 for maximum coverage.

  • Screen Resolution

Now, let’s acquire the same data for screen resolution:

Here, we will consider only differing widths. For distinct heights, the scroll appears and the content can render properly. But if the width of a device increases or decreases, the components may not render properly. 

Summing Up

As already discussed, we will select the devices with the combination of Android OS 10, 11, and 12; and with device widths of 1024, 800, and 1280.

Note that these statistics will differ as per your app analytics.

Thus, we can narrow down the devices on which we can test the application and make sure that the app would work perfectly for a maximum number of users.

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