Mobile QA
13 articles
-
Rebalancing a Live Game: How I Broke Veteran Players Twice and Why the Test Was Green
I reworked the balance of my idle game, and a player with a maxed-out tower died on wave one. I shipped a fix with a test, and the same player wrote: "I have millions of HP but can't kill a single enemy." The test was green because it checked the wave number, not kills. A first-person breakdown: why a rebalance is a data migration, which saves to test with, and how to check the outcome instead of a proxy.
-
Phantom Users: Where the 'Bots' in Your Mobile Analytics Come From and How to Tell Them from Fraud
A batch of new users suddenly shows up in your analytics, all on the same old phone model: they open the app, poke around for a minute and leave. The first thought is fraud and a burned ad budget. Often it's Google's own robots from the pre-launch report. How to tell test devices from bots, check the source in five minutes, and filter that traffic out so it doesn't ruin your funnel and retention.
-
Memory Leaks: How to Catch the Bug That Only Shows Up After an Hour
The app works perfectly for five minutes and crashes after an hour. A classic memory leak that no short test case catches. We cover what a leak looks like from the QA side, which scenarios expose it, how to measure memory on Android, iOS, Unity and the web, and what to attach to a bug report so a developer finds the cause in an hour, not a week. With a checklist.
-
Offline Mode in a Mobile App: What Breaks When the Network Disappears
How to test an app with no network: what must work offline, an action queue with no losses or duplicates, sync conflicts, the app killed while offline, and an honest cache. With tools and a checklist.
-
Multiplayer in a Mobile Game: Testing Network, Lag and Reconnect Without a Hundred Players
Multiplayer doesn't break in game logic, it breaks at the seams: latency, packet loss, desync, a dropped connection mid-match. We cover how game networking works, which bug classes it produces, and how one tester with two phones can reproduce all of it. With a reconnect matrix and a checklist.
-
Layout Testing Across Screens: Notches, Safe Areas, Foldables and Font Scale
Your phone is one device out of thousands. What breaks across aspect ratios, cutouts, foldables and at 200% font scale — and how to test it. With a checklist.
-
Push notifications: a 10-section testing checklist
Push notifications are one of the most under-tested features in mobile apps. A QA checklist usually says 'arrived / not arrived'. But there are dozens of real cases hiding behind it.
-
Testing In-App Purchases in a mobile game: 9 sections and a checklist
IAP is the most expensive code segment for a bug. One missed case of 'money charged, item not granted' means support tickets, refunds, bad reviews, and retention at risk.
-
Maestro vs Appium: what to choose for mobile UI testing in 2026
Appium has held the throne since 2014, but if you're picking a stack for mobile UI tests today — look at Maestro. Faster to install, simpler to write, and for casual projects often covers 100% of needs.
-
Proxyman for QA: guide to inspecting and rewriting HTTP traffic
HTTP/HTTPS traffic between an app and a server is the single biggest source of mobile bugs that are hard to reproduce: analytics, IAP, ads, remote config, A/B tests, push notifications.
-
Performance testing for a mobile game: 7 metrics that actually matter
'The game lags' is too abstract for a ticket. To make a performance problem reproducible, measurable and trackable — you need concrete numbers. Here are 7 metrics worth checking every release.
-
What the emulator won't show: 5 classes of bugs found only on real hardware
Emulators speed up CI and are convenient for smoke tests, but relying on them alone is self-deception. Some problems only appear on a real device with a real load, battery and sensors.
-
adb for mobile QA: 40 commands that save hours
ADB (Android Debug Bridge) is the main tool for mobile QA on Android. A list of commands that are actually used during regression and bug triage.