(Live) slow connection mobile testing

Holidays are these times when we go outside, fly abroad, spend a lot of time on wasting it and basically doing nothing. What is a common feature of such places?
Slow internet connection – no matter if it is within your network or WiFi.
I, an addicted smartphone user, find it as a one of the most annoying things EVER!

As I probably wrote at least once, I use my smartphone (Android) as a mother ship 😀
(It would really be a pain if I lost it).
Anyways, I use my phone for shopping purposes as well. What is more, taking into account a ‘typical woman‘ stereotype – I do a lot of shopping. 90% of which I do online. The conclusion is simple – the more time I have to waste – the more I buy 🙂 Having said that, imagine my frustration during online shops explorations, when I do experience slow internet connection.
In addition, I am not talking about websites only, but about well-known native apps, which , as it turned out, are not supposed to handle limited network range.

Today, I would like to present you a true wall of glory, basing on my holidays explorations. I’ve called it – the SlowCo Art Gallery of inspiring issues.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want it to be pure hate only, but maybe an inspiring feature to test for all of you working with any kind of mobile application or websites.

How to handle such testing (to avoid irritating me in the future)? Short introduction down below or in one of my old posts here.

Shall we begin?

Pic.1. Where is my CSS? – Example from douglas.pl

Pic.2. A journey through classes? – Example from H&M Android app

Pic.3. We don’t know what the hell just happened, so we’ll provide you with a random message – Example from native Twitter app
(Translation from Polish: An important service, without which this application is not able to run, is currently not available. Try later.)

Pic.4. We are creative in producing 404 pages – Example from jednosc.com.pl website

Pic.5. At least one of those messages is valid. Hopefully. – Example from Google Play app

As you can see – the range of failure possibilities is really vast BUT the issue is the same in each example. In the end, all those bugs may seem funny 🙂

On the other hand, we are able to protect our applications and websites against SHAME by performing sets of basic network connection test cases.

How to stress the app, pretending slow connection?
My favorite option is to open Chrome, click F12 on your computer and go to Chrome Developer Tools.
Navigate to Network -> Throttling and select a connection version that you are interested in. Slow your connection down, and see the magic 🙂
You can also connect your mobile app with Chrome Dev Tools and stress it.

It may sometimes seem as an edge case, but imagine all the people, who live most of their lives in the area of slow internet connection. How frustrating might it be for them?
Hey mobile testers – Let’s make apps great again! 🙂

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Cheers!

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