The move towards mobile devices began in the first decade of this century and it has grown rapidly ever since. New trends in the IT world have been introduced with penetration of digital mobile phones and resulted in many changes concerning the industry players. Apple’s iPhone and competing attempts from Google, Microsoft etc. increased the hype and resulted in a constant battle for market share in the smartphone market.

Adoption of smartphones as well as tablets; devices with a bigger display and less focus on the telephone functions, introduced the idea of using many mobile applications in a single device and the concept of centralizing sales through these applications from a single source. These mobile devices had a profound effect on the IT industry and mobile testing is also impacted by these changes.

Since the demand for mobile applications increases tremendously, IT firms are required to provide mobile services and support related business processes in order to satisfy the growing need. Consequently mobile testing became a crucial subject that no firm can neglect to focus on to be able to succeed in the information technology sector. Even though mobile testing is related to testing software in general, it differs from the previously established test approaches in many IT firms and these differences can be shortly stated as;

• With the introduction of mobile systems, companies needed to take into account different mobile systems requirements associated with the new features. For instance, depending on the location, smartphones use services such as GSM rather than a secure network within the company.
• There are some differences in terms of quality criteria of mobile and traditional software platforms. The priorities tend to shift from previously established standards in certain areas such as security, ease of use, maintainability, etc. Since mobile devices offer a lot more interfaces and data is exchanged over internet via these interfaces, each additional gateway increases the security risk. Moreover, mobile software needs to take into account the battery life of smartphones and be moderate as much as possible on the hardware resources.
• Traditional quality assurance tools may no longer be used for iOS, Android and other similar platforms. For this reason, new testing tools should be considered to be able to meet new standards in security and efficiency.