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Appium is the Only Way To Go for Mobile Automation!
October 12, 2017

Appium is the Only Way To Go for Mobile Automation!

Randall Kelley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Appium

At this time, my team is only using Appium, but this will most likely change as other teams have automation needs with mobile devices. The main reason why Appium is a good choice for us is that it allows for tests to interact easily with both Android and iOS devices. Instead of using one toolset for Android and another for iOS, Appium combines how automation functions with each platform and puts it all into one library.
  • Allows for a one-stop library to interact with both Android and iOS devices.
  • Appium has the backing of Sauce Labs, so there's considerable support for this library.
  • It's free! Open source with a lot of community support.
  • 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.
  • Appium is open source, so it's free. That's budget friendly right there.
  • The ability to write mobile automation tests has saved considerable time for our manual test team, but that is true with most automation tests.
  • We use Sauce Labs with our other automation, but Appium works great with Sauce Labs, as well, if I needed to run on emulators and simulators.
  • xcode and android sdk
Hard to compare Appium to Xcode and Android sdk because Appium uses them, but those are the only comparisons I could come up with to compare Appium with another product. I'm sure there may be other mobile automation tools, but none are as mainstream as Appium or with the support. You will need to install both Xcode and Android sdk to have Appium function.
When testing on both Android and iOS (and who isn't?) then Appium is a great option. If there are some special scenarios that are needed to be tested like working with a device's file system or anything that might be outside of the app (maybe switching between apps while testing) then Appium may not meet all of your needs. I say that cautiously because there may be some functionality that I'm just not aware of yet or maybe coming soon that would work with this. I just haven't come across it, yet.