Appium vs. DronaHQ vs. Xamarin

Appium works well for well-structured mobile applications test automation that is particularly easy to leverage when different pages of the app use similar building blocks. If it takes time for some content in the app to be rendered, ask your dev team to add progress indicators and ensure they are accessible. That might be more complicated to do with Appium, though, if there's no good contact with Dev team established so you can request accessibility IDs added quickly enough when needed. Appium supports another locator strategies as well though (such as xPath or iOS class chain on iOS) but they wouldn't work as fast so you may get really slow tests.

Incentivized

If you enjoy being ripped off and ignored, I would highly recommend DronaHQ. If you are unable to configure the app yourself, they will connect you to a contractor. You will be charged by the hour, so its within their interest to drag the project out as long as possible. Once the project is delivered, you may find that the app is super slow e.g. 1-2 minutes for a page to load. When you complain, they will blacklist your email.

Xamarin is well suited for several reasons. The first, it allows companies to share code across platforms. If the app has a lot of business logic and a fairly simple UI, Xamarin is great for this use case. Xamarin also works well if the developers who will work on the app are already fluent in .NET. Xamarin is less appropriate if the company has a lot of developers. If there are plenty of resources to develop apps natively then the headache of dealing with Xamarin's issues are not worth the effort. If the UI is very complex and has difficult animations it's difficult to debug visual/performance issues in Xamarin.

Incentivized

• Crossdevice: With Appium you can automate tests for Android and iOS both. There is no need to learn more than 1 language.
• Easy: It's really easy to configure and use appium; it's very useful when you're testing strategy is based on "developers write tests".
• Open Source: It's such a nice strength of appium, because you don't need to pay to use a good tool like Appium is.

Incentivized

• charge by the hour
• over promise
• super slow loading time

• We save development time with Xamarin, because we use Xamarin Forms an so we can share most of the code over 3 platforms.
• We can use our C# knowledge to develop iOS and Android Apps.
• Xamarin's integration into Visual Studio is very good and became even better during the last releases of Visual Studio.

Incentivized

• There are a number of expected methods that are not implemented, yet. With a similar sounding name as Selenium with similar functions, people who are familiar with Selenium try to use methods that appear to be available, but give a "not yet implemented" exception when run.
• Documentation can be confusing.
• Setup was a difficult process. This may not necessarily be the case once you figure everything out, but the whole figuring it out process was difficult and I ran into many, many problems when I first started.

Incentivized

• Not ripping people off
• providing pages that load
• respond to emails

• Having also done a lot of native mobile development, some of the IDE's features need to emulator their native counterparts. For example, trying to extract a string resource on Android in Xamarin Studio is painful. There are many useful tools in Android Studio that Xamarin should implement.
• Xamarin will always be behind on native platform features. They must catch up when Apple and Google release new platform versions.
• The biggest pain point is the random issues Xamarin continues to have. Having a large code base on top of a native platform makes it very difficult to debug issues. Every developer must decide if its an issue with Xamarin or the native platform. Bugs don't get fixed very quickly. Hopefully that will change with the Microsoft acquisition.

Incentivized

I am rating 10/10 because Appium can use with multiple programming languages with multiple Test engines. Also, it works for both Android and iOS.

Incentivized

Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done

Incentivized

I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow

Incentivized

Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.

Incentivized

Most of mobile testing tools which are available in the market are paid license tools. But Appium is Open source mobile testing tool. We can create customised automation framework using Appium. It also supports various languages such as Java, Javascript etc. And also supports various operating systems such as Android, IOS etc. We can easily integrate Appium frameworks with CI/CD [Jenkins, Git etc].

Incentivized

I was charged approx. $10k by DronaHQ to build an app over 6 months with page loading speed of 1-2minutes. Bubble.io took 2 weeks and $1000 to build a far superior app with page loading speed within 2 seconds.

Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.

Incentivized

• For cost of ownership, the increase is positive times infinity, as it's free to install and use
• Lead time for suite development can be a negative, if not planned for during sprint planning
• Using Appium to execute tests in parallel across a cloud solution can improve CI/CD cycles by 100's of a percent

Incentivized

• ROI is negative 100%

• Code Sharing - We were able to launch an Android implementation of our app within weeks after finishing iOS. The amount of time taken to develop a new platform is very small.
• Monetization - not the best, but definitely getting better. We've had issues with finding suitable ad networks that work with Xamarin.

Incentivized