How to Test Mobile Apps 📱
A thorough guide that includes practical playbooks for companies at every stage.
Mobile apps are the primary interface through which hundreds of millions of people interact with services daily.
Smartphones have been a thing for 15+ years, during which they have arguably changed… not so much, especially in recent years. For this reason, it may be reasonable to expect a flawless experience at every tap.
Instead, the reality is different and painful — especially for mobile engineering teams: an ever-expanding universe of devices, hardware, OS versions, screen resolutions, and capabilities, that software must navigate correctly.
Welcome to hell mobile fragmentation.
In my previous life as a startup CTO, I ran a travel web app that had native counterparts on iOS and Android, and I swear that mobile testing and QA was one of the things that kept me up at night. It is incredibly hard to do it right, yet supremely important, having a direct impact on user satisfaction, churn, and ultimately, the bottom line.
So today we are publishing a full guide on fragmentation testing which provides a comprehensive but pragmatic approach to the problem, by covering principles, strategies, and tools.
We are doing so by drawing from my own learnings, from the ones of people in the Refactoring community, and by bringing in the invaluable experience of Nakul Aggarwal, CTO and co-founder of BrowserStack.
BrowserStack is a cornerstone of how thousands of teams — including my former own — engage with real-device testing at scale, and Nakul is one of the world’s most knowledgeable people in this space.
So, as you will see, success in mobile testing is about making smart choices, and focusing your efforts where they yield the greatest return. We'll explore how to define "good enough" in a world of infinite variables, and how to build a testing approach that supports, rather than hinders, your engineering velocity.
Here is the agenda:
💥 What is mobile fragmentation? — defining the beast and its many heads.
📉 Cost of fragmentation — the real-world business consequences.
📖 Fragmentation testing playbook — how to build your full testing process, from strategy down to tactics.
🪜 Testing strategy vs product maturity — how your playbook should evolve over time.
⚖️ Navigating the trade-offs — balancing cost, speed, coverage, and developer experience.
🔮 The Future is Still Fragmented — trends, the role of AI, and some closing notes
Let's dive in!