Mobile Applications Testing Tools

Mobile phones are revolutionizing today’s world, in fact reducing the time we spend in front of a computer for online transactions, browsing, listening to music, watching videos and working with several other applications. This shift from computer to Mobile phones had eventually increased the development of Mobile applications. But the challenge is in developing and testing them on various platforms of mobile devices. The mobile applications can be basically classified into Web applications, Native applications and Hybrid applications. Web applications for mobile are web pages that are specifically designed to be viewed on a mobile phone’s browser. The Native applications are applications like phone’s contact application, call registry application, etc which are specific to the phone and does not connect to internet. The native and hybrid applications may vary according the various platforms, but the web applications are rendered on mobile web browser and hence they are cross platform compatible.



On this post I am going to share an abstract on various tools available for testing mobile applications.

1. Device Anywhere
   • Supports Real Device Testing - The devices are located in remote location, it is basically accessing various phones through remote and performing test in them. Phone on which app is to be tested is rented instead of owning.
   • Testing with various network operators across various geographic locations can be achieved. Any mobile applications (web, native and hybrid) can be tested.
   • Supports all the platforms of devices. And cost of the tool is high.
   • The tool supports manual, and automation testing enhancing GUI and functional testing.
   • Purely network based tool.

1. Perfecto Mobile
   • Perfecto mobile is very similar to the Device Anywhere tool, only difference is that, perfecto mobile tool also supports performance testing to certain extent. Also cost of the tool is lesser than Device Anywhere tool.

1. TestQuest CountDown
   • Unlike Device Anywhere and Perfecto Mobile, TestQuest CountDown supports testing on both Emulators and on real devices (device needs to be owned).
   • Supports Android, Symbian, Blackberry, Windows 6 platform phones.
   • Cost of the tool is high. The tool used for Automation testing, tests GUI and functional aspects of mobile applications(web, native and hybrid)

1. Jamo Solutions – QTP Plugin for Testing Mobile Applications
   • The Jamo solution plug-in for QTP allows testing the mobile applications on both emulators and in real devices.
   • The cost of using this tool is high, as the cost incudes Jamo plugin cost and QTP license cost.
   • Supports iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry and Windows mobile 6

1. Selenium for Mobile
   • Selenium is an open-source tool supports Web application automation on iPhone, Android and Blackberry platforms.
   • The Selenium tool uses Java for writing automation scripts and hence eclipse is required. It supports both emulators and devices.

1. UI Automation – Instuments
   • The UI Automation framework comes with Instruments tool in MAC OS. It’s a free tool but requires Mac OS.
   • Supports Native and Hybrid application testing on iPhone and iPad.
   • Testing can be possible on both emulator and on device (only on Mac)

1. Robotium
   • Robotium is an open-source tool for testing Native and hybrid applications on Android devices and emulators.
   • Java is used to write the test scripts.

The above mentioned tools are the primary tools available in the market for test automation of mobile applications. There also other tools like See Test, Egg Plant etc which basically uses image comparison technique.