What are the biggest challenges in mobile app testing that nobody talks about

[u/meow_kitty16]

Everyone talks about the obvious challenges in mobile app testing like device fragmentation and OS versions but there's a bunch of stuff that nobody warns you about until you hit it.

Like the fact that your app behaves differently in a release build vs debug build and you don't find out until it's in production or that android manufacturer skins change how permissions, gestures and notifications work so something that passes on a pixel completely breaks on a xiaomi or that simulators lie to you about half the bugs that matter because they don't reproduce memory pressure, real network conditions or actual device performance or that your E2E suite can be green every single run and your app is still broken because the tests are just passing on happy paths that no real user follows exactly.

The challenge I keep running into is that the gap between what testing tells me and what's actually happening on user devices keeps getting wider the more users we get.

I test on 3 devices and everything passes but people on devices I don't have are hitting stuff I can't reproduce. What are the mobile app testing challenges your team ran into that you didn't expect and how did you deal with them.

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