“iOS 8 is the biggest iOS release ever — for developers and everyone else. But that wasn’t the goal. We simply set out to create the most natural experience. Each enhancement has a purpose. Every new feature deserves to be a new feature. Each function is more considered, each next step is more efficient. It all adds up to an even better experience — one that is pleasantly surprising at first and becomes utterly indispensable before you know it.”

What is new ?

Inter-App Communication

Inter-app communication means different things to different people. For some it’s the ability to push files from one app to another. For others it’s the ability to pull data into any field in any app. The core issue, however, is workflow. People just want an easier way to move their stuff around.

Touch ID Authentication

Touch ID is the name of Apple’s personal fingerprint identity sensor. It’s what currently lets you authenticate yourself to unlock your iPhone 5s and authorize iTunes and App Store purchases on your account.

 Custom keyboards

After years of waiting, Apple has finally brought support for third-party keyboards to iOS. Inside iOS 8, keyboards like Swiftkey and Swype, which have enjoyed huge usage on Android, will have system-wide access to all apps and services on your iPhone and iPad. Swiftkey has confirmed it’s onboard, but if you don’t fancy that, you’ll still able to enjoy Apple’s new QuickType keyboard. The company says the improved keyboard learns from the way you type and text, offering a pick of suggestions for your next word based on the content of your message or the person you’re conversing with. Planning a meal with your friend or loved one? The keyboard will auto-populate words like “dinner” or “eat” as you type. At launch, QuickType will support 14 regions including the US, UK, Canada, Australian English, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (that includes Hong Kong and Taiwan), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Thai.

Family Sharing

New to iOS 8, a user can add six others as family members. Family members can share purchased apps, music, and books using the same credit card. iOS 8 can also automatically set up photo streams for all family members. Calendars may be synced between all members. Kids can also send iTunes download requests for apps, music, movies, and more to their parents provided this service is set up correctly.

Third-party widgets

iOS 7 split notifications and widgets apart, putting widgets in their own Today view, moving Weather to the Today Summary, and adding support for Calendar, Reminders, predictive location, and the Tomorrow Summary. Yet they were still limited to built-in apps and services.

iOS 8 and Extensibility take it even further, allowing App Store apps to offer up their own Today view widgets — helpful information status indicators, simple, interactive utilities, and ways to launch into the full app when and if needed — easily accessible from anywhere on the iPhone or iPad, informational and interactive.

What a new OS or device release means to the developers and Testers?

Update Your Device/OS Test Matrix

Maintaining Device /OS Test matrix is already a big challenge for organizations. It is always a big question that what device and OS combination should be included in the Test Matrix and what should be not. One way to set your Matrix in right direction is you can take the help of Google analytics that what devices your audience/users are coming from.Now each OS Device release we have to refresh this Matrix.

How should we proceed and what all areas we should focus more:-

Functional Testing

According to Apple’s developer site “iOS 8 includes over 4,000 new APIs that let you add amazing new features and capabilities to your apps. Deeper integration with iOS means you can extend the reach of your app content and functionality.”

Inter App communication

Test if your application is able to interact seamlessly with other apps and Able to transfer Data from one app to other.

Notification center

If your app is using Notification API it is properly updated in Notification center and your application is able to customize its Notifications in Device Notification center.

Touch ID Authentication

If Your Application is using Touch ID Authentication the is it working fine as per your implementation

A/B Testing

App Login with Touch ID

In iOS 8 developers can now use Touch ID to let their users log into their app. Typing in a password introduces a lot of friction into the signup flow, but Touch ID is also a new technology that isn’t perfect every time.
Just because Touch ID is available for app login, doesn’t mean it’s the best option for every user. Set up a simple A/B test to see how leading with one option vs. another impacts sign-ins and sign-ups. Depending on who your audience is and how they use your app, you may be surprised by the results.

Let’s face it; Touch ID doesn’t always work as promised. It’s important that your app respond before your users start to get frustrated and consider abandoning. Try testing different options for help text and UI elements to guide your users to a successful entry.

Extended Sharing Options

iOS 8 now lets developers share content from their apps with a new sharing options API. This release comes a big question: where will developers embed sharing actions? and what type of actions with sharing surface?

We recommend experimenting with different places in your app you can surface the option to share. Make sure you pick a consistent place that makes sense for users as part of their interaction flow. This can be hard to know for certain, so we recommend brainstorming some options with your team and testing as many as you can.

The types of actions you surface in your sharing options is also really important. Too many actions will clutter the experience and confuse people, threatening drop off. Think about the high-value actions you want your users to take. Start by highlighting only those. Then, progressively test into adding other actions based on user feedback and team ideas. If you start to see adding actions are negatively impacting your engagement, you know you might be going too far.

UI Testing

Remember these points before Testing

Size Class

With iOS 8, Apple is introducing “size classes”. Size classes have vertical and horizontal dimensions called “regular” and “compact”. The iPad in both portrait and landscape defaults to the regular size class in both horizontal and vertical directions. The iPhone in portrait defaults to compact size class for horizontal and regular size class for vertical. The iPhone in landscape defaults to compact size class for both horizontal and vertical.
Apple provides some automatic behaviors based on size classes. For example, if you rotate an iPhone app that uses standard components from portrait to landscape (from compact/regular to compact/compact) the navigation bar gets condensed and the status bar disappears entirely. That’s to maximize the content on a screen that’s suddenly gone from being tall to being very, very short — like a web page on Safari.
Developers are free to customize the layout for every orientation of every device they support as well. For example, they can have two buttons stacked on top of each other in portrait orientation to take advantage of the height, and those same buttons aligned side-by-side in landscape orientation to take advantage of the width. They’re the same controls, their position and other attributes simply change as the vertical size class changes.

Split view

Apple is also bringing split views to the iPhone. That means developers no longer have to maintain two separate interface hierarchies, one for iPad that contains split view, and one for iPhone that does not. Now they can maintain one hierarchy for both and the proper screens will all be rendered based on size class.

Changed UI API’s

With iOS 8 Release Apple has removed some of the UI API’s and a list of bug fixes in UI KIT made it very essential for user’s to test the UI thoroughly.

Orientation

You need to test the rendering of their application as per the changed classes and views

UX Testing

Enhanced Multitasking

iOS 8 comes with enhanced multitasking functionalities. Testing your app user experience with this enhanced Multitasking feature of iOS 8.

iOS 8 Touch ID authentications

Testing the user experience of your application with iOS 8 Touch ID authentications functionality.

Notification Center

How Your Application Notification pushed into Device Notification center or What happens when your Device is in Locked state etc.

Performance Testing

CPU usage by Your Application on this new OS and device.
App performance during interaction of one app with others.

Security Testing

Security will also be a major focus of this release. New iOS 8 features will make it even easier to keep track of all your passwords and make sure they are as secure as possible