Customers today expect a flawless user experience. As apps go global, they just can’t afford failures. Any failures post-release are not just costly to fix but more importantly, impact the brand.

To ensure that they deliver a flawless experience, the following areas need to monitoring:

  1. Client-side app performance: Analysing your app footprint in terms of CPU, Memory, Battery, and Graphics is critical. Apps with a slow frame refresh rate will not be responsive.
  2. Backend latencies: Wait times of some of your critical backend services are key to track to understand if there are specific APIs that are slowing your app down.
  3. 3rd party SDKs & Integrations: Today’s apps integrate upwards of 6-7 SDKs on average. Ensuring that loading of these SDKs is not in the critical path is necessary.

To monitor these aspects, continuous testing is required. Running critical customer journeys 24×7 and monitoring their performance is important in identifying issues before your customers do.

And such testing needs to happen on real devices across makes, models, and OS versions. Such testing also needs to be done on devices that are connected to real carrier networks in locations where your customers are situated.

Device Farms are not structured for such continuous experience and performance testing for the following reasons:

  • Devices at device farms are placed in data centers and not in actual customer locations.
  • Devices are connected to Wi-Fi networks with consistent service quality while real carrier networks are often inconsistent in their service quality.
  • Devices are often rooted or connected to VPN/Proxies, meaning that your production apps cannot be used as-is for testing.

It is for these reasons that MOZARK, a leading platform for user experience testing, pioneered the concept of setting up distributed device testbeds that use your own devices in the locations of your choice!

Testers today are keenly focused on not just functionality but how their app’s performance and user experience are. And they are looking for synthetic, continuous testing to ensure they can catch issues much before their customers do.

Thus, distributed bring your device model of setting up the monitoring infrastructure is a must.

Written By

Chandrasekar Ramamoorthy