AWS Device Farm is a mobile application performance testing application that provides real-time automated testing and reproduction of issues, simulating and testing issues that may occur on a variety of platforms (e.g. iPhone or Samsung mobile device, or multiple operations systems, etc).
1. It's open source which supports range of languages, operating systems and languages. Well suited for Android and IOS mobile automation. Supports all kinds of apps, which makes it flexible and robust mobile testing tool 2. It is less appropriate where we need intercept network call to verify the API calls. Extensive coding experience is required to work Appium
AWS Device Farm is perfect for small teams who don't have enough resources to conduct large scale testing scenarios or even large teams who would like an easier time with testing on various devices. [AWS] Device Farm makes it very easy to interact with a multitude of devices right from the browser.
I would like to give 9/10 rating to Appium because of it can easily integrate with popular frameworks and CI/CD tools, as well as it is reliable, flexible and easy to use. The setup can bit complex in initial step, but once on configured it's very easy to use and enables stable and scalable mobile automation for real and cloud devices.
We had the enterprise support with AWS, so overall support experience was good with great engineers on the back providing answers. As you may know, overall AWS support is different and this is not different. Responses through the regular web support channel came easily, fast and accurate. We had questions/issues which were solved fast. Documentation is good as well, especially around the test automation pieces.
If you're an Apple developer, you use Xcode. It's practically a forced necessity. For system testing though, it doesn't have to be. You can have your development team focus on unit and integration tests in their platform and another team automate acceptance tests with a language they are more familiar with.
We haven't used anything like AWS Device Farm before. I am familiar with Amazon Web Services and when we had our MVP ready to test, we turned to AWS for a solution. AWS Device Farm was exactly what we were looking for as we have a really small team and limit resources.