What Is Appium? Why Need Appium? Limitations Of Appium

What Is Appium?

• Appium is mobile web, native and hybrid software application test automation tool. 
• It is open-source software automation tool which is useful to automate android and IOS platform apps.
• Most important thing is : Appium is “cross-platform” automation tool so you can write software automation tests against iOS and  Android (multiple platforms) using same API.
• “cross-platform” enables you large amount of code reuse between iOS and Android test suites.
• Appium support software test automation on emulator or simulator and physical mobile devices too.
• Aooium is developed on few key philosophy points : 1. Should not have to recompile your app to automate it. 2. Should not be locked into a specific language or framework. 3.  Should be open source and 4. Should not reinvent the wheel when it comes to automation APIs.

Why Need Appium?

If you are mobile app software test engineer, Appium can makes your mobile app regression testing task easy. Specially for large mobile apps where continues apps are updating with new features and functionalities. Another main benefit of using appium for mobile app automation is : It supports bellow given multiple platforms and languages. Also you can use any testing framework.

Multiple Platforms Support

Appium support bellow given different platforms.

• Android
• IOS
• FirefoxOS

Multiple Languages Support

Appium supports bellow given languages with the Selenium WebDriver API and language-specific client libraries.

• Java
• Objective-C
• JavaScript with Node.js
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• C#
• Clojure
• Perl

Also there are other advantages like no source code is needed to test app as you can test it directly, also you can engage built in apps like camera, calendar etc in your test script if required.

Limitations Of Appium
There are few limitation in appium right now.

• For Android, No Support for Android API level < 17.
• Script execution is very slow on IOS platform.
• Gestures support is limited.
• No support for Toast messages.

I think, this is enough to use any open source software automation testing tool in terms of usage flexibility.

Note : Appium supports only Android 17+ API level versions. Otherwise you need to use selendroid. You can find API level for your phone based on its version at THIS PAGE. That means, You can use appium if your phone contain Android 4.2 or greater version.

We will see how to execute android native app automation test in android device and emulator using appium in my upcoming posts.Upcoming posts will also describe you how to configure environment in windows to use appium software testing tool.

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