Load Testing Native Mobile Applications with LoadView

Load test automation using cloud-based tools is the best choice for developers of native mobile applications. The advantages of mobile testing from the cloud include:

• Testing under complex real-world scenarios
• High test scalability − from one to thousands of simultaneous users emulation
• Adjustable traffic pace
• Global testing from different geographic regions

Generally, native mobile applications retrieve all configurations and data via a RESTful API over HTTP from the server.  This means that the performance of native mobile applications fully relies on back-end API availability. Having 24/7 access to the application’s API is crucial for business and the end user experience. Moreover, since all business logic is received by the mobile client from the back-end, and failures at the API level affects the application’s productivity, examining the full functionality of the API is critical.  Testing API performance allows you to make sure that the application’s API behaves as expected, as well as ensuring the application can handle business scenarios under a certain load on the server.

LoadView supports native mobile application load testing at the API level. LoadView emulates concurrent HTTP requests from the application to the back-end API and checks the responses for particular content or errors.

Get Started with Native Mobile Application Load Testing

To get started with native mobile application load testing, select HTTP(S) test solution and configure API calls to test the functionality you want. You can test the authentication process, API interaction logic, check if API returns correct content, etc. Here are some tips on how to configure your test scenario:

1. First, determine the most realistic real-world usage scenario for your application. You can emulate real use cases by testing the sequence of HTTP requests to repeat a real data flow.
2. To check if your API returns expected results under a load, add content validation of the API responses.
3. You can extract data from API responses (body, headers, etc.) to variables and re-use the variables on subsequent test steps.
4. Use the advantages of dynamic variables to create a comprehensive test scenarios. For example, testing a form submit with different inputs.
5. Configure a load pattern based on the expected number of concurrent requests to your back-end API.

During the initial configuration, it’s typically required to configure an authentication call to get an API access token. Once access to the application API is received, you can create the HTTP(S) requests that are likely to be made to the back-end. For steps on how to configure an authentication request for an OAuth 2.0-based API, read our article here.