To deal with the increasing demand for highly functioning mobile applications, developers now also need to ensure their mobile application with the same robustness and performance that consumers demanded on other computing devices.

However, the mobile frontier has also brought with it new challenges. Listed below are some of the more important things we need to consider:

• Network availability at the place where the device is in use plays a very important role and there is no way to control this environment.
• Mobile phones make more requests (thus create more load) on the servers compared to desktop devices.
• There are many types of operating systems, and we need to make the app compatible with each.
• Innovations happen quickly in the mobility space, we need to keep up.
• Executing a performance test and simulating the production behavior of mobile users is essential, but difficult since users keep moving from onelocation to another while using the app. Their network capabilities change quickly from one place to another.

Performance testing mobile apps:

• Try to bring the test as close to the production environment as possible.
• Don't worry about the factors that are beyond control.
• Use network simulators while running the tests, and through these simulators, try decreasing and increasing the available bandwidth to reproduce real-life environments and variables.
• Perform tests the replicate clients getting disconnect from a network.
• If something like this happens, try to resolve the issue and retest to avoid data loss. Sharing key details in the user sessions helps in such situations.
• While using simulators (during your load tests), try performing the same functionalities using a mobile device and check for the app performance in manual mode.
• While simulating the test, focus only on the key end users (operating systems & devices) that cover 70-80% of your business scenarios and don't go for exceptions (not necessary to go for all devices), unless the exceptions are too critical. This will help you save on your resources.

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