Mobile Automation

Testing with Selenium

and Appium

This blog will give you an overview of mobile automation testing using

Appium. Appium is an open-source tool for automating native, mobile

web, and hybrid applications on iOS and Android platforms. It is a

Node.js server that automates native and hybrid mobile applications.

We can write the tests in any language supported by Selenium, using

the WebDriver API.

Native apps are those written using the iOS or Android SDKs. Hybrid

“ ” — a native control that

enables interaction with web content. Mobile web apps are those that

can be access using a mobile browser (Appium supports Safari on iOS

and Chrome or the built- ‘ ’ ).

It is easy to write tests against mobile apps, especially after

using Selenium and Web Driver. The same test code is used for testing

both the mobile site and the native Android / iOS app. The only

difference is in setting up the configuration, where you actually tell it to

use the Web Driver, Remote Web Driver, Appium Driver or the

Android Driver.

Appium automates Android and IOS using the UI Automator library,

which is provided by Google as part of the Android SDK and Appium

inspector for IOS.

Appium Inspector and UI automator viewer tool :

Very handy when identifying some visual elements in the

applications.

Appium inspector is a combination of the Appium server itself and

the inspector, that is used to discover all the visible elements of your

app while developing your test scripts.

Inspector works well for iOS, but for Android there are some

problem areas with it. To that end, we encourage the use of UI

automator viewer.

The UI automator viewer tool provides a convenient GUI to scan

and analyze the UI components displaying on android device.

You can use this tool to inspect the layout hierarchy and view the

properties of UI components that are visible on the foreground of the

device.

This information lets you create more fine-grained tests using UI

Automator, for example by creating a UI selector that matches a specific

visible property. The UI Automator API is bundled in the UI

Automator.jar file under the /platforms/ directory. The API includes

these key classes, interfaces, and exceptions that allow you to capture

and manipulate UI components on the target app.

CONCLUSION:

Appium runs on real devices and emulators. It takes the Selenium

commands from your test code and translates them into a readable

format for UI Automator, using the WebDriver JSON Wire Protocol.

The UI Automator testing framework lets you test your user interface

(UI) efficiently by creating automated functional and UI test cases that

can be run against your app on one or more devices.