App Promotion Strategy

The Beginner’s Guide for Android App Beta Testing

Erika Holland
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Android app beta testing is a crucial stage within the software improvement lifecycle. It helps keep your cellular app high quality and enhance its person expertise, amongst many different issues.

Beneath, we take you thru all of the fundamentals of beta testing your Android app as a way to assist you put together for this section. From what beta testing is and its advantages to the place to search out beta testers, the best way to distribute your Android beta app, and extra, that is your all-in-one information that can assist you prepare for Android app beta testing.

 

Table of Contents:

What Is Android App Beta Testing?

Android app beta testing is a section of the software program improvement lifecycle the place a gaggle of exterior customers (beta testers) take a look at your software in real-world environments to find errors and give you suggestions. You need to use this person suggestions to repair any current points forward of your app’s manufacturing launch in addition to to implement much less pressing concepts in later iterations.

 

Beta Testing vs. Alpha Testing

Beta testing and alpha testing are two completely different software program testing strategies. Whereas each depend upon getting your app within the arms of human testers, alpha testing is performed internally by members inside your organization for high quality analysis. At this level, the app shouldn’t be anticipated to be 100% full and is more likely to have a number of bugs and crashes. The target of alpha testing is to establish the obvious errors as a way to repair them forward of the beta testing section.

The beta testing section is performed after alpha. Contributors are exterior testers who’re unfamiliar with the app and try it for the primary time in real-world eventualities. At this stage, the app is sort of able to launch. The aim is to enhance the app’s high quality, usability, and general person expertise, and to establish any final points earlier than its closing launch.

Be taught extra about alpha vs. beta testing.

 

Why Android App Beta Testing?

 

Android app beta testing helps you save time, cash, and energy. Beta testing advantages embody:

  • High quality: Guaranteeing and sustaining your app’s high quality, ensuring that every little thing is working correctly and that you just’re offering one of the best person expertise attainable.
  • Value: Catching bugs earlier than launch. Android app beta testing saves you over the long term as errors in manufacturing are extraordinarily pricey.
  • Efficiency: Ensuring that your Android app is as much as business requirements and customers’ expectations.
  • Proof of Idea: Validating your concepts primarily based on suggestions from actual customers.
  • Extra Testers: Uncovering bugs that slipped by way of earlier take a look at phases, since extra testers means a larger range of system environments and use patterns.
  • Numerous Views: Gathering a broad spectrum of suggestions with various views from customers of various backgrounds, demographics, and locales.
  • Early Adopters: Constructing a neighborhood of customers earlier than even launching your app.
  • Google Play: Guaranteeing a better likelihood of passing Play Retailer evaluate, as Google strongly encourages builders to launch early variations of their apps for alpha and beta testing to catch errors and make enhancements earlier than its closing launch.

Bugs and Crashes: Discovering issues along with your app that it is advisable to repair or optimize earlier than launching your app.

 

How Many Beta Testers Do You Want?

Research have proven that solely one out of 5 beta testers will strive your app and give you suggestions, and also you want a minimal of 100-300 testers to make sure that your app is correctly and totally examined. Except you have got a big firm and everybody in your staff is actively concerned within the testing course of, which means that you’ll want no less than 500 to 1,500 beta testers to get a correct quantity of high quality suggestions.

Study dogfooding your app as an alternative choice to recruiting exterior beta testers.

 

The place to Discover Beta Testers?

  • Betatesters.io: Easy, simple, straightforward to make use of. Powered by Instabug.
  • Beta Household: A crowdtesting neighborhood for beta testing the place you possibly can take a look at your app on actual individuals and get an trustworthy opinion on the person expertise and filter by age, gender, nationality, system, OS and extra.
  • Erli Chicken: Offers you the ability to beta take a look at with actual individuals in actual environments and accumulate on-demand person suggestions. Powered by a worldwide neighborhood of 100,000 real-world testers.
  • Twitter: Discover testers utilizing the frequent hashtags #betatesting, #betatesters, #testmyapp, #indiedev, #mobileapptesting, and #gamedev and #gametesting for cellular video games, or scout for potential testers by checking a number of public Twitter lists which were compiled by different apps.
  • Reddit: You will discover beta testers on a number of subreddits together with r/beta, which has 350K+ beta testers, r/betatests, r/TestMyApp, r/alphaandbetausers, r/androidapps, r/AndroidAppTesters, and r/gamedev for cellular video games.
  • Betalist: A neighborhood of makers and early adopters showcasing their startups and exchanging suggestions.
  • Applause: Connects your app to the world’s largest neighborhood of digital expertise high quality consultants, providing you with genuine enter and perception from actual individuals in real-world settings.
  • Quora: Most early adopters and influencers will be discovered answering questions on Quora, so make certain to succeed in out to them, interact with them, and get their suggestions about your app.
  • Hacker Information: HN’s neighborhood likes to strive new issues. That’s a terrific alternative to get skilled suggestions from a really tech-savvy viewers. Submit your app to ShowHN, however make certain to comply with the foundations.
  • Product Hunt: When you’ve launched your app, it’s best to submit it to Product Hunt, a spot for product-loving lovers to share and geek out concerning the newest cellular apps, web sites, {hardware} initiatives, and tech creations.
  • Killer Startups: A information website that accepts submissions for evaluate.
  • UserTesting: Gives an on-demand human insights platform that helps you discover and join with the precise audiences you want, with out the hassle, to offer suggestions.
  • UserZoom: Essentially the most complete UX insights platform in the marketplace.
  • Betabound: Collects, organizes, and provides beta testing alternatives in an ongoing stream.

 

What to Ask Beta Testers?

The largest downside with Android app beta testing that cellular app builders and product managers report shouldn’t be getting sufficient helpful suggestions. To find the insights you want, it is advisable to ask your beta testers the precise questions.

When designing the survey questions you’ll ask your beta testers, comply with greatest practices to encourage a better response charge and extra correct solutions. For instance:

  • Numerical Solutions and Scales: Quantifying the solutions permits testers to offer you extra exact suggestions.
  • A number of Alternative Questions: Encourage participation by making it simpler on your testers to take action.
  • Particular Particulars: Begin with a normal side you wish to know extra about, break it down into identifiable components, and ask about these components.
  • Open-ended catch-all query: Give your testers the chance to depart another feedback they may have in an unfiltered means.
  • Purpose for destructive suggestions: Search to elicit solutions that time to areas the place your app wants enchancment\

The best way to Encourage Your Beta Testers?

After you have your beta testers, it is advisable to inspire and encourage them to take part as a way to get high quality suggestions. Some ideas for motivating your Android app beta testers embody:

  • Respect: Acknowledge your beta testers’ efforts and keep long-term relationships.
  • Swag: Construct model loyalty and switch your early adopters into promoters as strolling billboards on your app.
  • Present Playing cards and Promo Codes: Choose a retailer or model that your beta testers could be excited to redeem credit score from.
  • Public Appreciation: Publicly acknowledging your beta testers’ efforts makes them really feel appreciated, incentivizes others to take part, and builds general model loyalty.
  • Discounted or Free App: Given all of the hours your beta testers put in to guage your app, allow them to have it totally free.
  • Factors and Prizes: Institute a factors system or rewards program the place beta testers can obtain merchandise associated to your app or win big-ticket prizes.

 

How Lengthy Ought to Android App Beta Testing Take?

The size of the Andriod beta testing section relies on many elements, together with:

  • Targets: The extra aims you have got on your beta take a look at — whether or not it’s suggestions about bugs, performance, person expertise, and so forth.— the extra time you have to to cowl all of them.
  • Testers: The extra testers you have got, the sooner you’ll be capable of cowl all of the aims of your take a look at.
  • Participation: Offering your testers with a correct onboarding, informing them beforehand of your objectives and aims, and motivating them all through is not going to solely improve the standard of participation from their finish as a result of they’ll know what to search for and perceive your expectations, it is going to additionally clean out the method and set them as much as execute at a sooner tempo.
  • Deadlines: You probably have a launch deadline to satisfy, correct planning forward of time is essential. You can also make up for shorter beta take a look at durations by aiming to get extra testers in addition to optimizing your beta program to gather high quality suggestions reasonably than simply amount.

Recommended beta take a look at durations for Android apps vary between two to 12 weeks, with most beta exams taking a mean of 4 to eight weeks.

Within the case of speedy launch cycles with ongoing beta packages and steady integration and steady deployment, beta builds are launched as typically as nightly. Be taught concerning the high CI/CD instruments for Android apps.

 

A/B Testing

To be taught as a lot as attainable out of your pool of beta testers, you possibly can phase them into a number of teams as a way to conduct A/B break up testing on your Android app. It will assist you uncover insights from evaluating the outcomes and outputs of various person teams. You can too use A/B testing to make sure that localized variations of your app are bug-free in real-world environments of various locales.

You may break up your customers primarily based on many attributes, together with:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Nation
  • Language
  • OS Model

One other technique is to separate your customers into nearly equivalent teams and have every take a look at out completely different options of your app. This permits them to be extra centered and helps you save time by working a number of experiments directly.

 

 

Android App Beta Testing Distribution Instruments

 

As soon as your beta construct is prepared, you’ll must ship it to your testers to put in and take a look at. There are numerous Android app beta testing distribution instruments on the market that make this whole course of very simple, together with:

  • Google Play Developer Console: A useful device for indie Android builders and small to medium groups that don’t have many necessities for his or her beta take a look at.
  • Beta by Crashlytics: A robust device that meets most of the wants of a beta take a look at whereas nonetheless scaling properly.
  • HockeyApp: Presents intensive integrations with many of the standard instruments utilized by builders.
  • TestFairy: Integrates with lots of standard instruments for bug monitoring, communication, and steady integration.
  • Appaloosa: An enterprise-focused device that isn’t appropriate for smaller groups.
  • DeployGate: A device that may assist small to medium groups speed up their beta take a look at and deployment.

 

Android App Beta Testing Outputs

 

How have you learnt in case your beta take a look at was profitable? One of many first and most vital steps of the testing course of is defining your testing metrics — measurable indicators primarily based in your objectives for the take a look at.

If it’s a non-public beta, then the primary focus is often on usability and high quality assurance, whereas public betas are extra marketing-focused when it comes to consciousness and accumulating suggestions on factors like pricing and options. A few of the key beta take a look at metrics to contemplate are:

  • Stability: Monitoring the variety of bugs in your app over time in addition to their severity.
  • Churn Price: Monitoring the proportion charge at which customers cease utilizing your cellular app in a given interval and understanding the place the drop off factors are.
  • Significant Participation: Monitoring the quantity of high quality, actionable suggestions that you just obtain in comparison with your general charge of suggestions.

 

The best way to Enhance Significant Suggestions

with an Android Beta Testing Instrument?

We discovered that implementing our in-app person suggestions device can lead to a 750% improve in person response. That’s extra knowledge you need to use to enhance your app, higher possibilities of figuring out issues, and because you’re utilizing a third-party bug reporting device, extra time to repair errors.

 

How Can Instabug Assist?

Instabug is the highest Android beta testing device for cellular apps. It gives probably the most helpful metadata in the marketplace, distinctive buyer assist, and an in-app communication channel to talk along with your testers and customers.

With every bug report, Instabug routinely sends detailed person knowledge to builders, together with the person steps wanted to breed every bug, community request and console logs. App customers also can submit display recordings and screenshots that they will annotate by drawing on, blurring, and magnifying components to offer additional context to their reviews.

  • Instabug Integrations:Jira, GitHub, Slack, Trello, Zendesk, and extra.
  • Instabug Pricing: Paid plans begin at $41 per 30 days.

 

Conclusion

Android app beta testing is an important stage in your software’s improvement lifecycle. Put together your self forward of time and ensure to delve deeper into every side of the method. Ensure you cowl this guidelines forward of your beta launch.

Most significantly, be sure you talk along with your beta testers and repeatedly inspire them to give you high quality person suggestions. In any case, your app’s success relies on them!