80% fewer customer-reported issues for a reservation app across Android and iOS

Slotyourspace is a mobile reservation app for the food and beverage industry in the Middle East. Diners use it to find and book tables; venues use it to manage availability. For a product like this, a bug is not an inconvenience. A booking that fails on a Friday night is a lost table for the restaurant and a diner who does not come back to the app.

The situation

When Slotyourspace approached NorthQA, the problem was device fragmentation. Android users were reporting issues that the team could not reproduce on the handful of phones they tested with. The reports clustered around specific manufacturers and OS versions. iOS was in better shape but still generating a few reports of its own.

The underlying causes were in the process rather than in any one bug:

• Testing was manual and limited to the devices the team had on hand
• Each release went through the same testing by hand, so coverage depended on time and attention
• There was no systematic check across the device and OS combinations the real user base was running
• Deployment and testing were loosely coupled, so a build could reach the store with gaps nobody had noticed

The team's goal was straightforward. They wanted the app to feel seamless on whatever phone a diner happened to own.

What NorthQA did

Reworked the deployment and testing workflow. We went through the existing release process with the team and revamped it in several passes. Each build now moves through defined testing stages before it is submitted to the stores, with clear criteria for what has to pass. The workflow was adjusted as we learned which checks caught real problems and which were noise.

Introduced mobile test automation. We built an automated suite covering the core reservation journeys: search, availability, booking, modification and cancellation. These run on every build, which means the critical paths are verified the same way every time, regardless of who is releasing or how busy the week is.

Added cross-device testing. The automated suite runs across a matrix of Android and iOS devices and OS versions chosen to reflect the actual user base, including the Android combinations that had been generating reports. Device-specific regressions now surface before release instead of in a customer's review.

Kept manual testing where it earns its place. Automation does not replace a human looking at a screen. Manual testing stayed in the workflow for new features, visual checks and exploratory passes, with the routine regression work handed to the suite so testers could spend their time on what automation cannot see.

The results

Since the new process went in, Slotyourspace has seen an 80 percent reduction in customer-reported issues every month. The reports that still come in are mostly edge cases: unusual device setups, rare sequences of actions, the kind of thing you find only with real users at scale. The mainstream Android and iOS experience is stable.

For the team, releases are faster and calmer. The question before a release is no longer "did we check it on enough phones" but "did the suite pass", and the suite has a clear answer.

What this engagement shows

Mobile quality problems are usually coverage problems. A team can be thorough and still miss what breaks on a device they do not own. Automating the core journeys and running them across the devices that matter turns that from a guess into a measurement. This is the kind of work our test automation service delivers.