What is Beta Testing?

Beta testing involves distributing the app to a large pool of audience before the launch for testing purposes. The end goal of beta testing is to find and fix bugs and gather insightful user feedback before the actual start of the app for real users. Thus, beta testing is a non-public and limited release of a mobile app. 

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All apps undergo extreme testing processes before reaching the beta testing phase. However, even the most rigorous internal testing does not guarantee complete bug fixes or 100% unit test coverage. Moreover, replicating near-real environments for testing can be hard and costly in the early stages of development. 

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However, mobile app businesses must put their app under the beta testing phase before the final launch. It timely highlights the presence of any critical bugs and saves them from being transferred to the production. During the beta testing phase of mobile application development, app developers need to strategize a plan for optimal results.

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They need to configure:

• No. of Beta testers required for the app launch
• Type of testers needed for beta testing
• The onboarding process for the beta testers
• Crash reporting tool set up before the beta testing starts.
• Ways to support beta testers during the testing phase

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Very often, businesses neglect the beta testing phase during product development. Also known as user acceptance testing, beta testing acquaints the app makers with customer validation. This kind of testing may also unearth valuable feedback about customer experience and product design. App businesses can leverage this feedback to refine the product before the final release. 

Beta testing an app can revamp user experience by shedding light on hidden usage inhibitors that internal teams often overlook. The feedback from actual users can ensure product success, providing value to the end customers.

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Advantages of Beta Testing

Quality Check

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Running an app live in the real world across many different devices and environments may uncover multiple issues that might have slipped past the app development team. So, beta testing the apps allows businesses to monitor and optimize the app’s performance. App teams can test the infrastructure and backend to ascertain that the mobile apps are ready to scale.

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Product Management

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App businesses can validate their apps with real users thanks to beta tests. This kind of testing can reveal a lot of insights about users behaviour. Beta testing is a vivid opportunity to examine in-app behaviour like where are they getting stuck or the most common drop-off points. Qualitative feedback from beta testing helps improve the overall app experience before app launch. 

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Customer Support

The support team working for new app products are not always familiar with its pros, cons and different use cases. Beta testing helps support teams gain familiarity with their app and identify issues users face, and work out their solutions.

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In Summary

Beta testing is a critical phase for mobile application development and reduces the risk during app deployment. 

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Selecting the right mobile beta testing tools can help development teams in planning their beta testing strategy and get the most out of beta testing. 

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Userexperior is a state-of-the-art beta testing tool and UX analytics tool that helps app development teams with bug reporting and gathering user feedback through visual session replays and interaction Heatmaps. It caters realistic data on customer support, user behaviour on the app and serves as an easy tool for in-app feedback.