Any organisation making the transition to mobile grapples with this million dollar question: What devices and operating systems should we be testing our apps against?
So far, the market has not provided an easy or consistent answer for marketers or anyone else involved in bringing a new smart phone or tablet app to market. A mix of informed opinion and guesswork is often used to plan how to check whether a key marketing app will work on the devices you believe will be relevant to your market. But, this approach isn’t working well enough as too many apps fail to work to a high usability standard even on popular devices.
It doesn’t help that today’s mobile market is extremely fragmented and constantly changing, challenging organisations with different devices, future operating system releases, and the pressure to deliver flawless customer engagement. Currently, most enterprises have no standard approach for testing mobile apps and responsive websites, and the business impact that non-tested or poorly tested apps have can be devastating to a brand.
To begin a testing strategy to ensure continuous quality, enterprises need a standard set of mobile devices to test apps and responsive websites against that represents their target market and end users. While this is of value to the technical department, non-technical roles in marketing and business development also need to know what devices to test on to ensure a smooth market launch.
Why should marketing and business leaders be so involved? Because mobile app quality now has a direct effect on brand identity and revenue, making any shortcomings in user experience extremely damaging to a company’s image and bottom line. Being able to understand the baseline for testing correctly is key to eliminating app glitches and those dreaded two-star app store reviews.
We recently did the first in-depth analysis of how marketers should plan for how to best bring business-critical apps to market based on the most relevant devices and operating systems.
From an analysis of which devices were being run for tests and indepth research into products and operating system releases, there are some striking insights for marketers. Almost a third (30 percent) of the market can be covered with 10-16 devices – including Samsung Galaxy S5, iPhone 6 and HTC One M8 – and are based on market adoption, market device leaders, reference devices and device characteristics.
The analysis also highlights how marketers need to take older operating systems into account. For example, iOS 7 still accounts for some 17 percent of total users out there, and should be included at the same level of iOS 8 test plans. Android 5.0 adoption rates are low in both the U.S. and Europe with Android KitKat (4.4.x) and JellyBean (4.2.x, 4.3.x) rating as the most commonly used versions.
And there are some wide geographic differences that need to be factored in. The research reveals that iPhones hold twice as much share in the U.S. than in Europe. Based on the data, the iPhone device family captures 35% of the U.S. market, as opposed to 16% in EU5.
The first question both business and technical executives alike ask when building a mobile testing strategy relates to coverage. A relevant device and operating system mix offers strong test coverage, getting the organisation much closer to the true end-user experience.
Benchmarks built from data like this will help. But we need to remember that it’s challenging to achieve desired test coverage for mobile end-user profiles in today’s rapidly expanding ecosystem, especially since a mobile device’s shelf-life is around nine months. In an ever-changing market, it’s going to be important that we keep reviewing continually updated research.
By Roi Carmel at Perfecto Mobile.
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