Table of contents:
What is Appium?
Appium was designed around the premise that testing native applications shouldn’t require a SDK or recompiling your app. Which means you should be free to use the methods, frameworks, and tools of your choice while doing tests. Appium is a free and open-source software project.
Appium is cross-platform, meaning it can be used to create tests for both Android and iOS. The same application programming interface (API) is used for each of them. You can now share code across Android and iOS test environments with this handy feature.
It’s compatible with native applications (those developed using the iOS or Android SDKs), mobile web apps viewed via a mobile browser, and hybrid apps that use Webview. Appium, for instance, is widely used by mobile game programmers, who often use complex methods for testing input-driven mobile games even while they’re simultaneously being played on two separate platforms by the same script.
Appium Architecture
Appium is a node.js-based server application. Only the command line interface (CLI) was available for Appium a few years ago, and the node package manager was the primary means of installation. Thanks to the hard work of the development team, Appium is now available as a desktop programme with a graphical user interface (GUI) that works with several versions of Linux, Windows, and macOS. You may get the most recent version of Appium from the Appium website.
Appium is a node.js-based HTTP server. Through a session, the client and server exchange information, with the aid of JSON objects representing crucial parts of the exchange. The JSON Wire Protocol for mobile devices is responsible for all communication. The desiredCapabilities parameters allow the server to tell the difference between an iOS request and an Android request.
Appium works with every popular programming language used to create mobile apps. Appium is compatible with several different programming languages, including Python, C#, Node.js, PHP, Java, Ruby, and JavaScript.
Appium also integrates seamlessly with popular CI tools like Bamboo and Jenkins. The platform and the CI servers may collaborate to improve the quality assurance testing process. The time and effort spent on testing will be greatly reduced.
Pros & Cons of Appium
- It enables automated testing on real hardware, simulators, and virtual machines.
- It’s compatible with a wide range of automated testing frameworks. Because of this, project migration is simplified.
- Appium’s simplicity and ease of use for newcomers are further advantages. If you already know Selenium, you can probably learn it in a week. In addition, the ideas behind the tests are simple to understand.
- The Appium desktop inspector can examine both Android and iOS app’s native components. The tool is functional in both virtual and physical environments.
- Advantages that Appium studio provides
- The execution engine – this provides Appium with a reliable, stable engine tailored to the needs of a mobile testing environment, enabling both the execution of tests outside of the actual app and the execution of several tests simultaneously.
- A visual testing development tool that facilitates the creation of faster, more reliable tests by offering capabilities such as device reflection and object spy.
- The report that is created after each test run includes the test’s comprehensive findings, as well as any relevant images or videos.
- Android versions prior to 4.2 are not supported for testing.
- It is more challenging to test hybrid apps.
- Inspector is not available on Windows.
- Appium test execution can be slower than other frameworks.
- There have been reports of setup and device testing issues from QA testers.
- Basic programming knowledge is needed (tests cannot be written in plain English).
- There is no enterprise support for Appium. If you run into issues while testing your app then you will have to rely on community support to solve your issues.
- Appium is not powered by AI-driven automation, and has not made much use of AI. This includes automatically generating test cases based on user behavior.
Conclusion
One of the major use-cases of Appium is for mobile game developers. Since mobile games require frequent testing frameworks like Appium make it easy to test features across both iOS and Android. Android and iOS Appium test scripts use the same language and are quite similar to one another. However, due to the vast differences between the user interface features of Android and iOS, you will want individual test scripts for each platform.
