Appium

Briefly touching on what is Appium.

So Appium is, Selenium created Appium with the intent of mobile test automation solution. Essentially at a very high level. Appium is an HTTP server essentially that actually envelops the native framework.

So you have android Espresso for android, XCUI test for Apple. Here, Appium comes in and actually has the ability to wrap the two together. So you now have one script that's available to run on the different platforms. 

So instead of having one script for Android, one script for iOS, so two scripts, Appium comes in and solves that device fragmentation problem where you have the ability to have one script that you can point and run on each of the devices or each platform.

So pros of using Appium open source and strong community. You can write one test to cover both Android, iOS, and Windows and available in most major languages. So you're not compatible to only Java or Swift Objective-C.

You can use any language you are familiar with and this does allow you to test on real devices rather than emulators and simulators. The pros of Appium continued. So it does support end-to-end testing with complicated gestures.

It also can be easily integrated into CI/CD pipeline, and most vendors support Appium, so just Kobiton, as well as supporting the native frameworks as well. The drawback of Appium is that it is so much slower compared to the native frameworks.

So running your native framework you are right within your IDE say Android, Studio code, or Xcode. You have your source code right in front of you. You have the element hierarchy available to you as well. So very fast execution with Appium and introducing that additional layer of that server response. It does slow Appium down a bit. With Appium, there may be a bit of a learning curve as well and the syntax of things.

So we're kind of moving away from the developer in mind. And Appium is definitely more of favors the quality engineer. But with that, there's still a learning curve. The environment can be a bit tedious to set up and only offers your devices locally, so you'd have to be paired with a DeviceLab management solution that can clarify your devices like Kobiton.

So once again, we do have a course outlining Appium and a course with Test Guild on how to get yourself started with Appium. So if you are looking to go that route, please navigate to Test Guild and you have that course available to you on how to set up your environment locally and how to begin running your Appium scripts.