Sauce Labs has extended Appium to support automated testing for Android and Firefox OS applications. Support for iOS was introduced earlier this year. Appium’s main features are:
- Developers can test native, hybrid and mobile web apps
- It can be used on real devices or emulators/simulators
- iOS and Android apps can be tested with a single script
- Mobile web apps usually need a separate script for testing, not the one used for native apps, because of the major differences of the graphical elements contained in web pages and the structure of such pages
- In order to execute the tests, Appium interacts with Apple's UIAutomation library and Android's UiAutomator framework for API versions greater than 16. For earlier Android versions, Appium uses Selendroid, an add-on
- Appium uses Selenium WebDriver API to send test commands
One does not need to recompile an application in order to test it with Appium. The tests can be written in any of the languages supported by Selenium WebDriver, including Java, Objective-C, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, C#, Clojure, Perl, Haskell, and in any testing framework - JUnit, RSpec, PHPUnit, Nose, Mocha, Cucumber, Capybara, Vows, etc.-.
Mozilla has recently added test automation to Firefox OS by implementing the WebDriver API, making it easy for Sauce Labs to extend Appium’s support to this mobile web OS. Jonathan Lipps, Sr. Software Developer for Sauce Labs, demoed running an automated test on Firefox OS during GTAC 2013 (see Firefox OS demo at 33’50”).
Sauce Labs has open sourced Appium and supports its development by offering automated mobile testing on simulators/emulators in a cloud environment that can scale up as needed.