IDG Contributor Network: Amazon and the hazards of inadequate app testing

Mobile app complexity is seriously tricky, as Amazon can attest. On Thursday (Oct. 13), the e-tailer quietly updated its app and confessed that its iOS shopping cart would freeze when a shopper tries to switch between apps. It makes one wonder how extensive mobile app testing is these days when this kind of glitch can get by the usually competent folk of Amazon app teams.

After all, it's hardly a wildly unlikely scenario. "Who could have predicted that iPhone users would ever switch between apps on their phone while shopping?" is not quite the defense an app developer wants to offer to an angry manager.

In Amazon's defense, mobile app interference is getting hard to avoid. A team that tests their app against the latest iOS or Android mobile OS has every reason to fear that the OS will update, with no notice, shortly after the app is launched. On the iOS side, Apple doesn't even widely brief its own people about what will be in a new OS update. On the Android side, OS updates may never reach many customers at all thanks to the open and decentralized nature of Android.

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