A Complete Guide to iOS App Testing
Tags: ios, testing, mobile, webdev
Published: 2024-02-16 11:42:06

Apple’s iOS is a popular OS for mobile devices like tablets and smartphones, with a 30% global market share and a whopping 50% share in North America. That’s why it’s vital to ensure your apps are compatible with iOS and work smoothly for your iOS user base.

Organizations can resolve this issue by [iOS app testing](https://www.headspin.io/blog/ios-app-testing-a-comprehensive-guide), which provides QA teams and developers with the means to assess how iOS apps perform across various hardware and software environments. Organizations can use app testing methodologies to test the behavior and performance of native, online, and hybrid apps across a wide range of devices, browsers, and iOS versions.

## iOS App Testing Types

**Manual Testing**
Manual testing, sometimes known as “by hand” testing, involves launching the app on real devices or an iOS simulator and then running through a series of test cases.

Although this method of testing iOS apps is time-consuming, it has its place. For instance, manual testing with real customers can unearth use cases that test engineers still need to consider.

When developers require a short, “one-off” look at a single feature of application functioning, manual testing might be useful early in the development process. Opening the application and running the test by hand eliminates the need to create an automated test script.

On the other hand, manual testing is impractical for systematic and objective app testing because it is hard to scale. You must perform manual testing only if there are no other viable options.

**Automated testing**
Systematically performing iOS app test automation is best done using automated testing. When a piece of code is updated, QA engineers and developers may immediately run tests to see how the app is holding up. This testing method ensures that your app functions as planned and that you may identify any issues before being released to the public.

You can perform automated testing in two primary ways:

**Unit Test**
Unit tests involve examining each part of an app separately. In most cases, the test will send the component a series of variables and verify that it delivers the expected results. As a result of catching errors early, organizations can reduce the cost of fixing the issues later in the SDLC. OCUnit is a framework for testing Objective C applications on macOS. One of OCUnit’s best features is its seamless interaction with Apple’s XCode IDE.

**End-to-end Tests**
[End-to-end testing](https://www.headspin.io/blog/what-is-end-to-end-testing) involves testing UI, the entire app logic, network requests, and the backend server. The purpose of these tests is to simulate real-world conditions and determine how the application will perform under load.

Developers usually run Automated unit tests early in the SDLC to locate bugs in isolated pieces of code. Then, before releasing a new version of the software, they conduct automated end-to-end tests to find bugs that the earlier unit testing phase may have overlooked.

## Frameworks for Automated iOS Application Testing

Many tools help with automated iOS app testing:

In 2015, Apple released a testing library called XCUITest. Primarily, it tests user interface components. When it comes to testing automation for iOS, XCUITest is as close as it gets to being “official.”

**Appium** is a free and open-source test automation framework that utilizes XCUITest to power fully automated iOS test execution. Developers prefer using Appium directly with XCUITest to test single framework apps on various platforms.

**Frank** is a free and open-source iOS automated acceptance testing framework. Throughout the years, it has maintained a reasonable amount of support.

**KIF** is a free software framework for functional testing. Taking advantage of the features of the iOS operating system designed to aid people with visual impairments makes it possible to automate these applications easily.

## Methods for Effective iOS Testing

If you want your iOS tests to be as thorough and efficient as possible, consider the following best practices:

- **Parallel Testing**: Perform several tests using a test grid instead of executing them individually. Much quicker returns imply you can start delivering your app much sooner.
- **Real Device Testing**: Although simulator testing is helpful at the beginning of the development process, testing on actual devices yields more accurate findings. HeadSpin’s test automation platform provides access to real, SIM-enabled devices that you can use to perform iOS app automation.
- **Test Consolidation**: You can work efficiently by writing your tests once and running them on various OS using a framework like Appium for cross-platform testing needs.
- **Perform Environment Configuration Tests**: Due to the consistency in iOS environments, it is tempting to assume that the significant difference in performance is in the hardware and nothing else. However, testing on a wide variety of configurations is essential. Users of Apple’s iOS platform can “jailbreak” their gadgets to gain access to additional web browsers and operating system customization options. If you want your app to function perfectly regardless of the users’ device settings, you should be able to simulate all of these scenarios in testing.
- **End-to-end and Unit Testing**: It is essential to perform both Unit and end-to-end tests. You should run both if you want to optimize your potential to find issues before they reach your consumers and find bugs as early as possible in the SDLC.

_Article resource: This article was originally published here https://www.techgenyz.com/a-complete-guide-to-ios-app-testing/_