Mobile Regression Testing: A Complete Guide for 2026

The pace of software change never stops accelerating. No matter your business context, everyone always wants to ship more software updates, more quickly, to more users. 

That’s no accident, because your users expect more updates more quickly, too. But that kind of velocity comes with a built-in risk: what if one of those updates breaks something for those demanding users?

That’s where regression testing comes in. If you’re not familiar, regression testing is exactly what it sounds like: tests that attempt to detect whether any of your code has regressed as part of an update. 

A regression means that something which previously worked in your code doesn’t do so anymore. That kind of mistake destroys the hard-won confidence your users place in you. 

That’s why companies invest heavily in regression testing when shipping software updates. However, if you’re shipping a mobile application (or perhaps multiple), you’re facing unique challenges related to regression testing. 

In this post, we’re going to break down what you should be thinking about for regression testing your mobile apps, and how you can use emerging technologies to gain an edge in the constant battle of needing to both ship and test more quickly.

Mobile Regression Testing: What Makes it So Difficult?

Mobile regression testing is unique compared to testing web applications or native desktop software. The reason for this is due to fragmentation. 

Fragmentation means that your software has to target a myriad of different system APIs and device capabilities. 

That means that when you’re testing for regressions while deploying new versions of your software, you need to ensure that every device target continues to work exactly the way that your users expect.

There are a variety of tactics that you might adopt to help manage this. Each of them comes with its own positives and negatives. Let’s talk about some of the most common choices.

Just cut out the number of fragments you support! 

Solution 1: Cutting Off Users

This is the simplest way of battling mobile fragmentation. Just cut out the number of fragments you support! While this does reduce the level of support needed for regression testing, it comes with a major downside: you’re removing users from your potential customer pool. 

That usually comes with some big negatives for your business. Most companies will only consider this option as a last resort.

Solution 2: Modularize Your Code

One way to cut down on the difficulty of regression testing is through modular code. The idea behind modular code is that you separate out code functions like business logic from behaviors that rely on native APIs like notifications or GPS integrations. 

This kind of modular application code means that you can easily test important parts of your application in complete isolation from the device that it runs on. 

Writing modular code is a universal best practice for any kind of code, but it comes with some trade-offs. In the context of mobile software development, the most substantial one is that many application features cannot be fully separated from the underlying capabilities of the devices that run them. 

You can modularize much of your application, but if your application’s functionality relies on specific operating system APIs or phone features only present in newer hardware and software, modularity won’t save you. It’ll only round off the sharpest edges of your testing regime.

Healthy software organizations run their automated tests every single time they push code to any deployable code branch in their organization. 

Solution 3: Automate Your Testing

This is another best practice that should be adopted by every software company shipping software that matters to their business and users. 

Modern software is much too complicated to rely on purely manual tests. Healthy software organizations run their automated tests every single time they push code to any deployable code branch in their organization. 

While this is a best practice, experienced developers know that this kind of testing regime comes at a cost. Especially for mature repositories, automated testing will increase the time needed to deploy new builds and create a substantial increase to your codebase due to the extensive automated testing code your developers need to write. 

What’s more, when trying to overcome platform fragmentation, you’re hit double: you cannot guarantee that just because a test passes on one version of an operating system or simulated device, that it will pass on every version. 

This fact means that you need to invest a great deal of time and computing resources into executing your automated test suite. 

Best Practices for Mobile Regression Testing

With all of these challenges, regression testing might feel impossible. Here’s the truth: all of these decisions require making intelligent trade-offs. That’s a key responsibility for experienced software developers: understanding which trade-offs to make and when. 

So let’s talk about some of the ways that you can make sure your mobile regression testing is the best it can be.

Focus on the Most Important Flows First

When you’re dealing with fragmentation, you need to focus your time and effort. You won’t have time to cover every single one of your application flows in every environment. So, spend your time wisely and focus on the parts of your application that bring you the most value. 

Run Your Tests Every Time

When something breaks, you need to know right away. That’s why you need to run your tests on every build, and cancel deployments any time one of your regression tests breaks. That means you don’t ship breaking changes to your customers, which is the whole reason we’re running regression tests in the first place.

Add a New Test Whenever Something Breaks

You’re going to ship bugs. It happens! That’s not great, but you can use it as an opportunity. When you do ship a bug, and you fix things, write a regression test to reproduce the bug. 

Add that test to your test suite, and make sure that you run it on every commit to make sure the bug doesn’t come back. Reliably doing this every time you push a fix means that you’ll build up a catalog of regression tests over time. 

Make Use of a Testing Framework

No matter what kind of app you’re writing, you don’t want to build a testing framework from scratch. That’s too much work for too little gain. The market is full of high-quality testing frameworks. Here’s a rundown of some of the best, and what sets them apart:

• Appium: This is a cross-platform open-source testing library that allows you to write tests using the same API for both Android and iOS.
• XCTest: This is Apple’s native, home-grown testing framework. Built right into XCode, it’s ready to go for any iOS project out of the box. 
• Espresso: The Android counterpart to XCTest, this is the native testing framework for Android apps.
• Maestro: This is an end-to-end testing framework for both cross-platform mobile apps as well as web apps. Ready for testing wherever your code is running.
• Detox: A grey-box testing framework that’s designed to work best with React Native.

Autify offers an AI testing agent that allows you to build and run regression tests using nothing but natural language.

How Autify Is Different

A lot of companies don’t have enough regression testing. The primary reason for this is because they simply don’t think that it’s worth the time investment. But as we’ve covered, regression testing is highly valuable. And that’s where Autify comes in. 

Autify offers an AI testing agent that allows you to build and run regression tests using nothing but natural language. Because you don’t need to write code in order to create regression tests, you can build regression tests against your mobile applications quickly. 

It provides you the opportunity to test not only your most important flows, but any flow that you need tested, as quickly as you can write the text needed to express the workflow.

Autify brings the power of good regression tests to everyone in your organization who understands how your app works. That means developers, product managers, manual testers and more all work together to create high-quality regression tests quickly and easily. Anyone who understands the intricacies of your mobile application is able to write regression tests and run them with simple plain english instructions. 

With Aximo, you can get started writing the world’s easiest regression tests today. You don’t need to know a thing about scripting, and your maintenance costs will drop to zero.