Mobile app testing teams face a unique set of challenges that – if not managed efficiently – can really impact your overall product quality and result in poor reviews, churn, and uninstalls.
That’s the bad news.
The good news? If you know what these challenges are and can anticipate them, you’re 50% of the way to solving them. And, whilst any obstacle requires thought and effort to overcome, the solutions aren’t necessarily super complex.
The key is knowing what actions you can take, and where you can use efficiency-boosting AI testing solutions to take the weight off your busy engineering team.
Here are 10 challenges of mobile app testing to bear in mind, with a couple of pointers on how to resolve them.
10 Challenges of Mobile App Testing, and How Your Team Can Address Them
1. Device/OS Fragmentation
One of the biggest challenges of mobile app testing is the sheer variety of mobile devices your app needs to work across. Thousands of different Android devices with different screen sizes and hardware specs. Dozens of iOS models. Frequent OS updates. Not an easy task.
This diversity makes it virtually impossible to test exhaustively, but bugs get missed when coverage is too narrow. With users spread across devices and OS versions, a small subset of device testing often isn’t enough.
How to Address This Mobile Testing Challenge:
- Maintain a core matrix of popular devices/OS versions based on usage analytics (e.g., top 5-10 devices that together cover 80-90% of active users). Review this often
- Use cloud-based device farms or emulators to extend your coverage
2. Screen Sizes and UI/Layout Differences
Variations in screen size, aspect ratio, device type, or pixel density can affect the rendering and behavior of your UI.
Inconsistent UI leads to layout bugs, clipping, or misaligned components. This provides a frustrating user experience and drives app store complaints. Manufacturers frequently experimenting with new device forms – foldables, for example – adds an extra variable to this.
How to Address This Mobile Testing Challenge:
- Make responsive UI design and flexible layout strategies (such as relative positioning) integral to your app – don’t add them as an afterthought
- Include UI/layout checks in automated tests across a few representative device categories (e.g., small phone, large phone, tablet)
3. Flaky Tests
A slight UI change, timing variation, or context switch can cause software tests to flake. This is particularly frustrating for mobile teams, where frequent updates are the name of the game.
These unstable tests become a bottleneck. Teams either lose faith in automation and ignore failures (risking regressions) or spend hours constantly fixing the automated tests that were supposed to be a timesaver.
How to Address This Mobile Testing Challenge:
- Opt for an AI testing tool with intent-based locators. These are resilient to UI changes – no more hours of test maintenance or misleading false positives
- Look for a tool that offers smart waits, so that dynamic page content (keyboard opens/closures, animations) doesn’t break your tests. Fixed ‘auto-wait’ features aren’t enough – the functionality needs to be dynamic
4. UI Context Switching (Native to WebView/Hybrid Apps)
Another challenge of mobile testing: many mobile apps are hybrid. Hybrid apps use native components with WebViews for things like payment flows and embedded web content.
As hybrid and cross-platform mobile apps become more common, poorly-handled context switching during automation can lead to flaky tests which miss bugs or mis-test critical flows.
How to Address This Mobile Testing Challenge:
- Identify and document areas of the app that switch contexts. Highlight context-switch steps explicitly in test plans
- Look for AI mobile testing automation with specialized support for context switching, so tests can transition smoothly between modes without hours of manual work
5. Coverage and Maintenance for Evolving Test Suites
Mobile apps evolve quickly. Chances are, your team isn’t getting proportionally bigger to deal with this workload.
UI redesigns, new features, and refactorings require new tests to be created and existing ones to be maintained (so that updates don’t cause flakes). Without the right tools, this dual expansion/maintenance burden becomes unsustainable, especially in fast-paced Agile development cycles.
How to Address This Mobile Testing Challenge:
- Use a low-code, natural language tool to expand your test coverage in hours – simply type what you want to test, and let the AI do the rest
- Make test maintenance part of sprint planning. When UI changes are made, include test updates as part of the same task (not as an afterthought)
6. Network Variability and Connectivity Issues
Mobile users frequently shifting between network conditions is a common challenge in mobile testing – from Wi-Fi to spotty 4G/5G, and even completely offline.
Many mobile apps depend on network calls – but an app that works smoothly on a stable Wi-Fi connection might fail under fluctuating connectivity. This can lead to crashes, incomplete actions, or data corruption.
How to Address This Mobile Testing Challenge:
- Include network-throttling and offline mode test cases by simulating poor connectivity, dropouts, and reconnects
- Validate data synchronization, retry logic, error handling, and data integrity under unstable network conditions
7. Performance, Load, and Resource Constraints
Mobile apps must perform well under constrained resources such as limited memory, CPU, battery, and varying device capabilities. Performance testing (render times, responsiveness, memory use, battery drain) is often neglected in favour of functional tests.
Users aren’t short of options, app-wise. If your app is sluggish or resource-hungry, the likelihood is that it will be uninstalled in favour of a competitor – your reviews and app store ranking will reflect this.
How to Address This Mobile Testing Challenge:
- Include performance benchmarks in your test suite, such as startup time, screen transitions, memory usage, and battery drain over time
- Test under constrained-resource scenarios such as low memory, background apps, and low battery, and optimize rendering, caching, and resource usage accordingly
8. Security, Privacy, and Compliance Concerns
Mobile apps frequently manage sensitive user data, so good security practices (proper permissions handling, encryption, secure API usage, and compliance with privacy laws) are vital in maintaining user trust and avoiding large fines from the regulators.
This is a particular challenge of mobile app testing at the moment due to both the stringency of existing data privacy laws and the evolving regulatory landscape surrounding AI. If your app incorporates agentic features or AI models, make sure you have a roadmap for compliance with the EU’s AI Act, much of which comes into force in 2026.
How to Address This Mobile Testing Challenge:
- Shift security testing left – making it a continuous process will allow you to respond better to threats and take a preventative approach by catching vulnerabilities earlier
- Always keep one eye on the latest regulatory developments – AI technology is maturing, so there will undoubtedly be more regulation to follow the EU’s AI Act.
- Combine functional tests with penetration testing or dynamic analysis, especially before major releases or updates
9. Limited Access to Real Devices During Development
Real device testing is useful, but it can be pretty difficult to maintain consistent access to the ones you need – even if you opt for a real device cloud provider like BrowserStack. Test execution is slower on real devices, it’s costly to scale, and you’re at the mercy of device booking and availability bottlenecks.
This causes challenges for mobile app testing teams working with modern CI/CD methodologies. To keep up pace of development, developers may skip early testing to avoid slowdowns, delaying bug discovery until late in the cycle. This increases the cost of fixes and raises the likelihood of regressions slipping into production.
How to Address This Mobile Testing Challenge:
- Use high-fidelity emulators for early validation of new features, UI flows, and core interactions to reduce bottlenecks – then verify on real devices if needed
- Standardize emulator configurations across your team to ensure tests run in consistent environments
- Use a mobile testing tool with ultra-fast emulator execution (1-second cold starts, fast installs, cached interactions) to encourage early testing and more frequent test cycles
10. Doing more with less
We can all agree that external QA has outlived its usefulness. It’s slow, siloed, and introduces unhelpful bottlenecks. Big Tech teams have moved away from it – and so should you.
There’s no argument that taking an integrated approach to engineering and quality is the way forward, with more engineer involvement in early-stage testing. The challenge is finding the time to realize the benefits this brings in an era of resource restraints for engineering teams.
How to Address This Mobile Testing Challenge:
- Implement natural language-based low code testing tools to allow engineers to test more code effortlessly
- Keep what you kill – retrain QA testers as strategic ‘quality engineers’ and integrate them into your engineering team
Momentic: Your Solution to Challenges in Mobile App Testing
As engineers, we understand the unique challenges that mobile app testing offers. That’s why we’ve built an AI testing tool specifically to address them, with:
- Self-healing tests with intent-based locators and smart waits, to minimize flakiness, ensure test results are accurate, and cut down on test maintenance hours
- Natural language low code test creation to minimize time spent building new tests and supercharge your test coverage
- A range of mobile-specific features, including seamless context switching between native and WebViews and ultra-fast emulator execution
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.
