Nowadays smartphones and mobile apps are used for almost everything. This means that mobile testing is now absolutely essential for businesses as their customers demand increasingly efficient and user-friendly digital services. The challenge, therefore, is to build better apps and websites with an impressive user experience and customer focus, doing so without spending a fortune. This challenge inspired an idea: “Why not ask final customers to test apps for us?” This, in fact, was the question Luca Manara and Edoardo Depoli, co-founders of AppQuality, asked themselves and AppQuality and its Crowdtesting service were created as a result.

AppQuality aims to deliver a memorable and impressive user experience by building high-quality apps and websites. “We refer to ourselves as the human touch in software testing. Every day, we test apps, websites, digital products and advertising campaigns to leverage the power of our priceless community (the crowd) of testers, who are geographically distributed and professionally managed on a cloud-based platform by our Quality Leaders that are responsible for the success of every project,” explains Manara.

"Being an innovator means to be aware that innovation is an ongoing process,  the ability to take smart risks, accept challenges on a daily basis, to be a great observer and, mostly, to be a good leader and mentor."

Luca Manara, co-founder of AppQuality

The cloud-based platform is built using standard web technologies and manages a geographically distributed group of users and testers to cooperate and bring value “from their own home, whenever and wherever they want,” Manara specifies. “We’re creating a tech layer for the future of work, not only for the technology itself.”

An inspiring approach for a customer-focused startup

“We create because we care about things. We build because we believe in what is possible. We innovate because we are constantly inspired by people around us.” With such an inspirational way of thinking, it’s easy to understand why Manara and the AppQuality team believe in innovation. The co-founder thinks that “innovation is not only reflected in the company’s products, but also in the way the company itself uses intuition and sensitivity to forecast what clients are going to need tomorrow and start working on it today.”

In fact, their solutions are designed to improve the user experience in every industry. For example, “in retail, the shopping cart abandonment rate is incredibly high (more than 70%); our solutions are particularly useful to identify all those bugs that block potential customers from completing their purchases. After having tested and fixed an online shopping store, the conversion rate increased by up to 10%,” continues Manara.

As leaders of crowdtesting in Italy, the company works with some of Italy’s biggest companies, such as Poste Italiane, Autogrill, Unicredit, Fastweb and Enel.  And AppQuality has no intention of stopping here: “We want to grow more internationally and reach more markets in the upcoming months. We’re already building foundations for strong development in Spain, where we are due to launch later this year.” The company’s crowd is already international and numbers around 250,000 testers located across the globe.

An enthusiastic partnership with a big future

AppQuality was forged and developed at the Politecnico di Milano and in partnership with Osservatori Digital Innovation. At the end of 2017 the company’s relationship with Enel started. “Our main projects together have been based on crowdtesting on mobile apps, focusing on both the technical and functional sides. Moreover, we had the chance to engage AppQuality in crowdtesting activities connected to web applications and above all concerning the compliance with accessibility regulations,” explains Giovanni Barillà, Head of Mobile Solutions, Productivity and Collaboration at Enel.

Crowdtesting is a strategic asset for Enel due our company’s strong focus on digitalisation and the results of working with the startup have been excellent. “The crowdtesting tasks performed by AppQuality have helped many working teams to improve efficiency during the testing phase, both saving effort in terms of reworking activities and identifying possible issues that otherwise would have been difficult to detect in advance,” highlights Barillà.

The AppQuality team is very excited about the collaboration too. “Starting to work with Enel is an opportunity to work with enthusiastic and motivated people who want to try something new everyday, they are part of a big group with many opportunities and international teams. Enel has enabled us to boost investment, improve the quality of our service and attract new investors who recognise the potential of our services,” Manara says. Let’s keep working and growing together!