An enterprise has to focus on several factors to effectively automate its mobile testing activities. It is also important for the business to compare the available automation tools, and pick the right one according to the specific needs of the project. Many businesses even prefer using open source tools to effectuate automated testing of mobile apps without increasing project overheads. Both Appium and Robotium are open source testing frameworks that are used widely by enterprises across the world.Appium Automation Framework As an open source framework, Appium is used widely by testers to create automated tests for major mobile platforms. The cross-platform test automation tool supports a variety of platforms including Android, iOS and FirefoxOS. Likewise, Appium can also be used for testing native, hybrid and mobile web applications. It runs tests by using a WebDriver interface. So the testers have option to write test cases in number of programming languages included in the WebDriver library including C#, PHP, Java, Python and Ruby. Robotium Android Testing Tools As an open source automated testing tool, Robotium is used frequently to evaluate a variety of Android applications. It is popularly regarded by programmers as the “Selenium for Android”. The UI testing tool further supports major versions and subversions of the Google mobile operating system. Robotium is actually a library of unit tests. While user Robotium for testing Android application, testers are required to test cases in Java. Important Points of Distinction between Appium and Robotium Support for Mobile Platforms: Appium is a cross-platform test automation tool, whereas Robotium is a test automation framework for Android. Robotium supports different versions and subversions of the Google mobile operating system. So it can be used for testing a wide variety of Android apps. On the other hand, Appium supports iOS and Firefox OS along with Android. It allows testers to use of standard automation APIs on different platforms. The standard automation APIs do not require the mobile apps to be modified or recompiled during testing. Type of Application: Robotium can be used for evaluating both native and hybrid mobile applications for Android. But Appium can be used to test mobile web apps along with the native and hybrid mobile applications. It can also be used by testers to control Chrome and Safari on mobile devices. So Appium can also be used to evaluate mobile websites across these web browsers. Option to Choose Programming Language: Robotium is designed specifically to test software for a specific mobile platform. So it does not allow testers to write test cases by choosing from a set of programming languages. While using Robotium for Android application testing, the testers are required to write test cases only in Java. But Appium is designed with a WebDriver interface that supports several programming languages. Thus, Appium enables testers to write test cases in any of the WebDriver-compatible languages including Java, PHP, C#, Ruby, Python, Perl, Objective-C, Clojure, and JavaScript with Node.js. Performance: Both Appium and Robotium lack Record and Play functionality. But Robotium requires testing professionals to work with the source code while automating tests. So testers have to invest additional time and efforts to write test cases for Robotium. Further, the Android application testing framework cannot effectively interact with system software, and does not provide screenshots. At the same time, the performance of Appium is impacted due to reduced XPath support on mobile devices. Also, many testing professionals feel the test reports generated by Appium to be poor and inadequate. In nutshell, a business can use Appium to test a wide variety of mobile applications, whereas Robotium can be used for testing only Android app. But a business must evaluate the pros and cons of these open source mobile testing frameworks according to the requirements of the application to be tested. To develop a stable product/application, please look out for the testing experts from a reputed quality assurance testing company. We provide Appium Testing services. If you would like to talk one of our Appium tool experts, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.
Usually testers have to learn several programming languages to evaluate the efficiency of a particular mobile app over various platforms. However Appium enables the experts for testing mobile apps with Selenium WebDriver. Therefore, they've choice to write tests by using various programming languages that works with the WebDriver such as perl, Python, PHP, Java, Objective-C, C#, Ruby, & JavaScript with Node.js. Additionally, they may choose any kind of testing framework to improve the speed as well as the ability of the testing work. Several organizations depend upon open source testing automation tools such as Appium for automation both the native & hybrid mobile apps. Currently, Appium is supporting many platforms such as iOS, Android & FirefoxOS. Therefore, the developers could easily automatighte both the native & hybrid apps by focusing on various platforms. Additionally, Appium also is considered as very flexible in the mobile app automation.The user even have choice to get the advantages of Appium Inspector, a record & playback tool for automate the native apps. This particular tool is created in an approach much to Selenium IDE for the Web browsers. This generates test scripts based on the steps carried out in inspector. Appium may even check the DOM, and also generate test scripts in the programming language chosen from the user. But, the Appium Inspector isn't compatible in Microsoft Windows currently. Being an HTTP server, Appium works well in creating & handling WebDriver sessions. It could additionally create & handle several WebDriver sessions for many platforms such as iOS & Android. This tool could be used to begin a test case on a device which starts communication from the server, and also gets proxy commands by the primary Appium server. Then again, the manner and the mechanism in order to run test case in the device is different in each mobile platform. Hence it runs the test case simply by listening the commands by the server. Monkeyrunner alternatively is an API built on Python, enables to generate programs that can manage certain devices with the user point of view. Some other testing frameworks found currently are Robotium & Robolectric. Robotium runs tests within emulators for all those against Android API. On the other hand Robolectric is an unit test framework. This runs within IDE. One more testing framework is called Espresso which is used for the certain purpose. This is an API used in order to test against the Android UI. Yet another well known testing framework which has been preferred for many years known as Flurry. For those who would like to get a report and detailed crash reports, can choose Flurry. Although the above testing alternatives are great, while building a hybrid app, you may not be able to utilize those at all. When you are in for the cross platform automation framework that can help you building tests in whatever language you want both for Android and also for iOS, you may then opt for Appium. Stephen Janaway is a Test Manager by profession. He works on mobile & web testing, test automation & software delivery optimisation. He has mentioned in a blog that he has used Appium and found it to be good. Since it went to version 1.0 it seems to have become more stable. He further stated that the important fact in mobile automation currently stands where it had been since five to six years back with web automation. There are plenty of solutions, few works better than the other, few are better supported than the others, and few are high priced than the others. He stated that they opt Appium simply because it is cost-free as well as it is open source, it features a well-supported and active Google group, it doesn't need anything to be installed in the device and no server or even code changes not required, it works with the two Android & iOS. It is more challenging to carry out some gestures, and others compared to several of the other solutions available that we piloted Calabash that was good in this respect, he concluded. To get maximum benefits of testing, you may consider hiring services of a Appium testing company. We provide quality assurance testing services. If you would like to get your application tested by our expert automation testers, please contact us at Mindfire Solutions.
