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Posted August 22, 2024

Network Throttling: Release Reliable Mobile Apps with Sauce Labs

Network throttling is a way to simulate and reproduce different network scenarios. But the task itself is easier said than done. Network Throttling combined with Sauce Labs debugging toolset, however, is a game changer.

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Did you know that network-related issues account for the top most common reasons for mobile app crashes and failures?

Ensuring your mobile app performs seamlessly under varying network conditions is crucial for delivering a reliable user experience. Let's explore how QA and mobile app developers can address these challenges effectively and ensure optimal app performance.

Key Challenges Devs and QA Face

Impact on User Experience: Poor network performance can lead to app crashes, freezes, and user churn. Ensuring reliability under all network conditions is crucial for maintaining high user ratings and engagement.

Simulating Diverse Network Conditions: Manual testing for diverse network environments is complex and time-consuming. Network throttling simplifies this process, allowing effortless simulation of a wide range of conditions.

Lack of Testing Environments and Tools:  Setting up end-to-end testing environments often requires multiple tools and complex configurations for network proxies and network rules, leading to cumbersome and time-consuming processes.

Enter: Network Throttling with Sauce Labs

Network throttling allows developers and QA engineers to simulate different network conditions, such as slow speeds (like slow 2G connection), packet loss, high latency, or complete offline states. By integrating network throttling into their testing pipeline, teams can ensure:

Reliable App Performance: Ensure your app performs reliably across all network scenarios, preventing crashes and improving user satisfaction.

Early Issue Detection: Simulate and reproduce a range of network conditions on iOS and Android to identify and resolve performance issues early in the development process.

Simplified Testing Process: Save time by eliminating the need for complex tool setups and configurations. 

Key features that help you accelerate testing process and ensure quality:
  • Integrated experience: Sauce Labs provides an integrated solution where customers can easily reproduce bugs, and simulate certain network conditions through our networkProfile/networkConditions capability.

  • Reproduce Bugs Quickly: Customers can easily determine which network configuration profiles to add to their automated tests. They can also reproduce specific bugs more efficiently with manual testing by enabling it dynamically during Live Testing at any point in their test.

  • Manage Specific Network Conditions: Customers can dynamically change and set different network conditions for running Appium tests using Appium’s executeScript. Instead of applying network conditions for the entire session with Sauce capabilities, customers can now turn network throttling on and off as needed for specific test cases.

Drive Quality at Speed with Robust Mobile App Diagnostics and Debugging Tools

To help software development organizations deliver best-in-class mobile apps at speed, they need a comprehensive suite of diagnostic test information, quality signals, more context and actionable data. Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud offers the broadest suite of app diagnostic information and quality signals to help you accelerate the debugging and release of mobile apps, by enabling faster determination of the root cause of test failures in the pipeline and errors in code. 

Capability

Helps you answer...

Key Benefits

Network Capture (Improved!)

"Where is the issue coming from?"

Capture HTTP/S requests and responses for mobile app (Android/ iOS/ iPad OS) tests, and get granular insight into your app’s behavior to facilitate debugging. Inspect network calls in real-time with our Live Testing experience.

Error & Crash Reporting

"Where in the code is the error happening?"

Automatically collect error and crash data in Real Device Cloud. Get complete context and insights to capture, prioritize, and resolve them faster.

App Performance

"Why did my app crash?"

Get deeper visibility into app performance with real-time vitals, including CPU usage, memory usage, and UI responsiveness.

Interactions

"What happened in this session?"

Fix UI problems faster with the ability to access user interactions and associate the test session actions with the app's UI.

DevTools for Android and iOS

"Where is the issue on my mobile web app coming from?"

Inspect and debug applications directly on the devices where issues arise, for all your real device cross-browser tests.

Explore Sauce Labs Mobile App Diagnostics and Debugging Tool Set

Empower your development team to build, test, debug, and deliver quality mobile apps that they can release faster and with confidence.

See how it works with a free Sauce Labs trial.

Ashwini Sathe
Sr. Group Product Marketing Manager
Published:
Aug 22, 2024
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