Mobile apps in 2026 need to be fast, reliable, private, and secure. But that’s always been true – you snooze, you lose.
What’s different as we head into 2026, and look ahead to the next few years? Mobile app testing teams need to incorporate new technologies (chatbots, generative AI, AR), all while being built and operated in a world where autonomous AI agents and new regulations change the rules of engagement.
Want your app to gain traction in 2026 (and beyond)? Here are some best practices for mobile app testing to bear in mind.
Get Your Workflows Ready for a Heavier Compliance Burden
How can we tell AI technology is maturing as a business tool? Easy. Regulation is catching up with the pace of development.
In 2026, teams shipping AI functionality in the EU should take note. Many provisions from the EU AI Act 2024 come into effect in August 2026 (notably full applicability). Act now, and make sure your workflows are ready for these enhanced compliance responsibilities.
Mobile App Testing Best Practices for AI Compliance
- Classify your systems: Decide whether an AI component qualifies as high-risk under local rules. This drives documentation and testing obligations, so keep records of your decisions and why you made them
- Document evidence: Maintain model cards, risk assessments, datasets, provenance (training/validation data), performance metrics, and deployment logs, ready for audits. Automated pipelines that snapshot model versions and data are handy here
- Safety, bias, and explainability tests: Add tests for fairness, robustness, and explainability claims. Include tests that verify allowed use (e.g., no biometric predictive policing)
- Human oversight and consent flows: For systems that influence people (such as recommendations or moderation suggestions), design clear human-in-the-loop controls, explainability prompts, and consent/opt-out flows to hit transparency requirements
- Third-party model due diligence: If you use external models or APIs, make sure suppliers provide compliance documentation (training data provenance, safety testing). You should also be clear on contractual obligations and breach remediation processes
Hybrid Teams: Don’t Neglect Mobile App Testing Concerns
This sounds obvious, but it’s a trap that surprisingly easy to fall into – especially if your team has only recently expanded into mobile app development.
Going into 2026, health check your mobile app testing processes for maturity and sufficient coverage. It’s never a bad time to take stock of where you are right now, and where holes in coverage have gone undetected.
Our Quickstart Mobile App Testing Checklist
Not comprehensive – but just to give you an idea of where to start looking:
- Network Variation Testing including network transitions (from Wifi and different cell networks), drops and reconnections, high-latency networks, captive portals
- Resource Impact Testing including power consumption, thermal throttling, background wake-ups/alarms
- Background, Foreground, and Lifecycle Transition Testing: including screen rotations (and disabling), incoming calls/notifications/alarms, OS-triggered app kills
- Sensor-Specific Testing: including multi-sensor interactions, permissions issues, noisy/faulty/slow sensor conditions
- Permission and Privacy Sandbox Testing: including first-launch permission prompts, revoked permissions, privacy dashboards
- Push Notification and Background Delivery Testing: including delayed or dropped notifications, delivery under battery-saver modes, open-app notifications
- Localization Testing with Device Settings: including RTL languages, device-based display changes, and locale-specific input
- Security Tests Focused on Mobile Attack Surfaces: including jailbroken/rooted detection, app cloning or repackaging, clipboard injection, misconfigured security
- Interruption Testing: including OS permission dialogs, low battery warnings, phone calls, SMS. Bluetooth pairing prompts, alarm triggers, screen locks
- Install Testing: including clean install, migration path testing, re-installing without removing existing data, handling corrupt installs
- Background Execution and OS Power Management Testing: including Android Doze Mode, iOS Background App refresh, OEM battery optimizations
- Monetization & In-App Purchase Testing: including interrupted transactions, canceled subscriptions, regional pricing differences
- Cross-App Interaction Testing: including sign-in via Google and Facebook, opening maps, camera, or payment apps, deep links and universal links
It’s Not Shift Left or Shift Right – You Need Both
‘Shift left’ testing methodology embeds testing earlier in the development cycle, so that defects are found earlier, when they are smaller, easier to find, and cheaper (time-wise) to fix.
‘Shift right’ emphasizes validation in live environments, with 24/7 monitoring, chaos engineering, and real-user data.
Teams are rapidly realizing that both approaches are essential for ‘always on’ digital services provided by mobile apps – by 2026, hybrid testing strategies are set to be adopted by over 70% of DevOps-driven organizations.
Mobile App Testing Best Practices for Shift Left/Shift Right
Shift Left
- Embed testing into engineering workflows: Run unit, linting, static analysis (including SAST), and contract tests on every commit. Use fast local emulators for immediate feedback
- Use AI test generation and pre-commit checks: Use AI-assisted test generation to propose pre-commit unit and UI tests – with human review processes either side
- Cut out external QA: Your engineers should test their own code as they go. This reduces ‘over the wall’ time sap, and inefficiencies caused by engineers writing code that’s difficult to test – use natural language low code tools to generate tests in seconds
Shift Right
- Schedule gradual rollouts: Release to smaller user groups first, then collect user feedback and roll back quickly if you identify any issues
- Use canary and dark-traffic testing: Route some traffic to new backend or feature developments and compare metrics (error rate, latency, engagement) against your baseline. Use synthetic traffic where possible to avoid harming real users
- Monitor mobile-specific SLIs: Define service-level indicators for mobile experience, such as startup time, crash-free users, and API latency. Alert on SLI breaches and tie alerts to runbooks
- Chaos engineering for mobile backend: Simulate network flakiness, partial outages, and issues with third-party services in production-like environments to verify performance
Brush Up on the Latest Mobile App Security Threats
It kind of feels like it’s cheating to include ‘security’ on a list of mobile app testing best practices. Like – duh.
Equally, when was the last time you or your team really sat down and got to grips with the latest mobile app security threats? Make it a New Year’s resolution to brush up on what you might be dealing with in 2026 – prevention is better than cure.
The OWASP Mobile Top 10 (updated every year) is a fantastic jumping off point – but don’t neglect the usefulness of your own user data in pinpointing vulnerabilities specific to your app!
Mobile App Testing Best Practices for Security
- Protect secrets and keys: Don’t hardcode secrets in the binary. Use platform keystores, rotate keys, and scan repos for accidental leaks during CI
- Scan dependencies and supply chain: Scan third-party SDKs and native libraries for vulnerabilities and license issues. Monitor for malicious SDK behavior such as excessive permission requests or background network calls
- Integrate runtime protections and tamper detection: Use runtime checks to detect jailbroken or rooted devices, hooking, and runtime instrumentation. Look for signs of tampering and disable sensitive flows on devices you think are compromised
- Step up your privacy-centric testing game: Correct consent flows, and ensure telemetry and logs are anonymized, hashed, or kept out of logs where not needed. This ties directly into regulatory obligations for AI and data protection
Sunsetting External QA Should Not Mean Sunsetting Quality
Mobile development teams are moving away from external QA. The over-the-wall approach is slow, siloed, and has the potential to introduce unnecessary technical debt – engineers divorced from the testing process create code that’s difficult to test.
Ensuring the quality of your mobile app is still essential. It’s a crowded marketplace out there, and poorly-built apps riddled with defects will not fly.
You can achieve a lot with AI here, but it’s worth considering where the ‘human’ element of QA goes too. Many organizations are pivoting their QA teams from executors to strategists skilled in interpreting AI insights and aligning outcomes with key business goals. You’ll see this reflected in job titles – ‘QA tester’ is out, ‘Quality Engineer’ is in.
Mobile App Testing Best Practices for Quality
- Integrate quality engineers within development workflows: ‘Quality’ should not be a separate department to ‘engineering’. Embed your human quality team into every stage of the development process – this will also help you shift left
- Upskill, upskill, upskill: QA testing roles used to be stepping stones for junior engineers – not anymore. You should see them as distinct roles with a key strategic benefit. This means you’ll need your Quality Engineers to be skilled in data analysis, AI/ML literacy, cybersecurity, and business strategy
- Know where AI works: It’s not just simple unit tests – AI testing tools can handle complex end-to-end tests, visual regressions and more. Take a look at where you are, and where you could expand AI workflows to increase coverage and efficiency
Momentic: Like Your Mobile App Testing Tool – But Much Better
We’re built by engineers, for engineers. We hate sluggish mobile tests as much as you.
That’s why, alongside our agentic AI and self-healing features (which will save your team a tonne of time), we’ve put the effort in to offer you:
- 1s emulator cold starts
- 1s app installs
- 200ms cached interactions
- Seamless context switching between native and WebViews (think auto-iframe)
- No instrumentation needed
- Embedded interactive preview
- 1-click APK upload
How effective is Momentic? Just ask our customers, who have saved over 40 engineering hours per month and expanded to 80% coverage in just two days.
Book a demo today to take your mobile app testing processes to the next level
