Even a good app, if not properly supported, will deliver negative economic benefit to your business. While design, functionality, and content are all important factors to consider when evaluating the effectiveness of an app, none of those considerations matter if your app has difficulty fulfilling the most basic requirement, which is to function on as many devices as possible (or on any device at all!). If your app has noticeable difficulties in response to new hardware or firmware updates on platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows, Blackberry, or Amazon Kindle, it will be completely dead in the water, and your users will quickly migrate to new solutions to access the services that you were providing. That is the challenge of operating in a marketplace where your competitors are literally only a tap or swipe away.
Ideally, you want to discover potential issues with your product before a new release of your app becomes available to the public—well before it has the potential to create difficulties for your client or user base. Additionally, when an update to a device’s operating system is released you will want to know how your app will perform in response to the changes that have been made well in advance (or as soon as possible) so that you can respond with lightning speed to fix any issues. Not only that, but updates might create security vulnerabilities that you need to address or risk compromising valuable data. Thus, having a dedicated and experienced quality assurance team is key in maintaining the functionality of your product and ensuring that fixes are made before they are noticed by your users.
Even better if your quality assurance team belongs to a team of experienced mobile app developers—some might say that’s the best of both worlds, because common problems will be foreseen and avoided during app development, while any issues that arise in testing can be quickly remedied developer-side. A top app developer, such as Clearbridge Mobile, maintains a full quality assurance team for those reasons exactly. Their team is able to do quality assurance on multiple devices in multiple environments, and they include both manual and automated testing in their service packages. When looking for a firm to handle your quality assurance—or your mobile app development—you should expect nothing less than the kind of services that Clearbridge Mobile provides, because of how crucial quality assurance is to product development and successful app implementation.
Bugs are the bane of any development cycle, but they are unfortunately unavoidable during the development process, especially when devising a unique or custom application solution (crucial if you want to stand apart from your competitors!). What is avoidable is having those bugs end up in the finished product and ruining the user experience—and in today’s fast-paced mobile development environment, that’s inexcusable. In order to get a better understanding of what quality assurance should look like, check out one of the top mobile app development companies. Companies with a good reputation have it for a reason, and they are able to minimize bugs and other conflicts as much as possible given current technological limitations. Because the last thing you want to worry about when operating in the mobile market is whether or not your customers can actually use your app!