First time testing a native mobile app?
Whether you’re building a companion app for a pre-existing web app or are starting completely from scratch, the mobile app testing process throws up a few quirks that you may not have encountered previously.
Understand and anticipate these, and they won’t be an issue. Read on for a comprehensive guide to the mobile app testing process and how you can make things easier with the right technology.
The Mobile App Testing Process: What to Bear in Mind
In many ways, the mobile app testing process is pretty similar to testing other types of software products – native mobile testing should verify that your app:
- Hits key functional requirements
- Offers an intuitive user experience
- Collects, stores, and processes user data securely, in line with relevant industry regs
- Performs well under high load
- Displays correctly across different screen sizes
However, there are a few extra considerations that make building and testing mobile apps trickier than web or desktop apps.
Mobile testing needs to account for functionality across iOS and Android, ensure correct display and function across hundreds of different devices with different screen sizes, and consider several additional variables, including:
- Gestures
- Sensors
- Network variability
- Performance, load, and resource constraints
- Context switching (native to WebView/hybrid apps)
These tests add extra resource requirements to your process, so it’s important to think about how you can minimize the impact on your release schedules. Ultimately, it’s equal measure smart tech and smart planning – here’s how to structure your mobile app testing process accordingly.
The Mobile App Testing Process: A Step-by-Step Guide
1. Requirement Analysis and Test Planning
Step one is the planning phase. This is where you:
- Review product requirements and user stories
- Identify supported platforms (iOS, Android), devices, and OS versions
- Define testing scope, timelines, and responsibilities
- Choose testing types (manual, automated, exploratory, AI-assisted)
You can decide to do everything at the end of the sprint and risk a load of rework getting in the way of your release schedule, or you can integrate your quality and engineering teams to test in parallel, align testing with CI/CD pipelines, and pick up bugs when they are easier and cheaper to fix. We know what we’d choose.
This is also the stage where teams decide how automation and AI will fit into your strategy. For example, AI testing tools that support natural language test creation can reduce the upfront effort of test design, allowing QA and non-QA stakeholders alike to contribute to test coverage.
2. Mobile Test Environment Setup
Next up in your mobile app testing process: create your test environment. You’ll need to:
- Decide where to use emulators and simulators
- Map out real device testing requirements, and secure adequate resources
- Ensure your test environment covers your required mobile OS and versions
- Choose the type of data for the test: production or synthetic
- Map out network configurations to test (Wi-Fi, 4G, 5G, offline scenarios)
Modern mobile testing tools can significantly reduce the time burden of environment setup by alleviating manual workloads around device and infrastructure management.
Tools like Momentic are designed to work across environments while keeping execution consistent – especially useful when running the same test suite across multiple devices and OS versions.
3. Functional Testing
Verify that every feature behaves according to stated requirements, including:
- User flows (sign-up, login, checkout, etc.)
- UI interactions (taps, swipes, gestures)
- Navigation and deep links
- Error handling and edge cases
A few years ago, functional testing would have been a real time sink, especially if your app had any particularly complex user journeys that traditional automation frameworks like Selenium couldn’t handle.
Good news: in 2026, AI-driven automation can shave a ton of time off the mobile app testing process with low-code tools. Why spend hours coding complex automation scripts when you can use natural language test creation to build executable tests in seconds?
4. Usability and UX Testing
Ensure that your app is intuitive and accessible for users, and meets their expectations. Check:
- Ease of navigation
- Clarity of labels and messaging
- Responsiveness to gestures
- Accessibility considerations
Think that this can only be done by manual exploratory testing? Think again. Autonomous agentic AIs can explore your app to analyze interaction patterns, flag inconsistencies, and validate the usability of your app as it evolves. This helps your team catch UX regressions earlier, before they reach production.
5. Compatibility Testing
Verify your app’s behavior across different devices, including:
- Screen sizes and resolutions
- Devices
- Device manufacturers
- OS versions
This is possibly one of the biggest challenges in the mobile app testing process. The sheer number of possible combinations makes exhaustive manual testing impractical – but relying on real device farms is slow, and incredibly expensive as you scale.
Your answer: more reliance on emulators. Realistic, AI-synthesized sensor inputs such as GPS traces, motion patterns, and network fluctuations mimic genuine user behavior more accurately than ever before. For example, feeding AI-generated movement patterns into a GPS emulator can uncover timing-related bugs and permission edge-cases.
Test widely on emulators, then verify interaction with any OEM quirks with a small amount of real device testing. It’s quicker, and – we’d argue – just as accurate.
6. Performance Testing
Evaluate how your app behaves under different conditions, such as:
- Slow or unstable networks
- High user load
- Limited device resources (CPU, memory, battery)
Including performance considerations as part of the mobile app testing process ensures that quality isn’t sacrificed for speed. Users won’t always be using their smartphones in an optimal environment – testing for performance prevents drop off and dissatisfaction.
Mobile app automation frameworks increasingly integrate performance checks into functional test runs. Agentic AI can help identify abnormal patterns and potential bottlenecks earlier in the development cycle, alleviating roadblocks and allowing engineers to focus their time on the highest-risk areas.
7. Security Testing
Test your app’s ability to handle user data securely and meet key regulatory requirements for your industry, focusing on:
- Data encryption
- Secure authentication and authorization
- Protection against common vulnerabilities
- Safe handling of permissions
Automated tests can verify security behaviors, such as session handling and access control, on a continuous basis. This speeds up the mobile app testing process, reduces risk of noncompliance due to human error, and makes it easier to keep ahead of ever-evolving cybersecurity threats thanks to increased test speed and coverage.
8. Regression Testing
Check that any new functionality hasn’t broken your app’s existing features and processes. Running full regression suites manually for mobile apps is rarely feasible at scale, so use an AI tool to:
- Maintain stable regression test suites
- Adapt tests automatically to minor UI changes and minimize flakiness
- Execute tests frequently without excessive maintenance
Instead of hard-coded identifiers that break when UI elements shift, AI self-healing tools use intent-based locators to interpret element descriptions and adjust tests as your app evolves. This minimizes the amount of manual test maintenance required – those hours previously spent fixing flaky tests can be reinvested in higher-value activities.
Combine these features with agentic AI, which can autonomously explore your app to identify high-risk areas and suggest or generate new regression tests, for ultimate efficiency in this stage of your mobile app testing process.
9. Release Testing and Monitoring
Perform a final round of rests to ensure your app is production-ready, including:
- Smoke tests
- Final compatibility checks
- End-to-end validation of critical user journeys
Ready to launch? Congratulations – but the mobile app testing process doesn’t end there.
Use ‘shift right’ methodology to validate your app’s behavior in live environments. 24/7 monitoring, chaos engineering, and real-user data can provide valuable insights that inform future testing efforts, creating a continuous feedback loop.
AI and the Mobile App Testing Process: a Match Made in Heaven
One common thread you may have picked up across the steps above: AI testing tools make mobile testing easier, faster, and more reliable. This is due to:
- Faster test creation and expansion of coverage through natural language tools
- Smarter test maintenance with self-healing locators
- Autonomous exploration using agentic AI
- Better prioritization of test execution based on risk
Tools like Momentic integrate these capabilities into a unified platform, making it easier for your team to adopt AI without overhauling your entire workflow.
Momentic: AI Testing for Mobile Apps
Momentic offers all of the above, plus a suite of useful mobile testing features, including:
- 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
Our customers have saved over 40 engineering hours per month and expanded to 80% coverage in just two days.
Want to join them? Book a demo today to supercharge your mobile app testing process.
