With the rising competition in the app industry, mobile testing without automation seems out of the picture. You can’t imagine frequent deployments or a faster time to market without automating your tests.
There are plenty of automation tools and frameworks available in the market for both Android and iOS. In this article, we will discuss some of the best mobile automation testing tools that can help you in releasing quality apps on time.
1. Appium
Appium is a commonly used test automation framework for testing both Android and iOS apps. It helps QAs to test end-user scenarios on native, hybrid, and mobile web apps.
Source: Medium.com
Features
- Appium supports all the leading languages including Java, Python, Ruby among others
- It allows the test automation team to maintain a single codebase while testing both Android and iOS versions of the application, which saves a significant amount of time and effort
- It covers cross-platform testing as well for Android and iOS applications
Though Appium is one of the most popular mobile automation testing tools, the UI tests of Appium are found to be flaky and the test setup is a bit complicated.
2. Testsigma
Testsigma is a cloud-based, AI-driven test automation platform that supports Agile and Continuous Delivery teams – for browser as well as mobile testing. It has all the essential elements needed to achieve a super-fast test development using simple English language.
Features
- Testsigma allows you to perform flawless mobile testing on real devices with no coding expertise required – for both android as well as iOS
- The in-built element inspector present on the platform identifies all the important information of the elements in the app in just a single click
- It provides complete access to 2000+ real Android and iOS mobile devices
- It offers a seamless integration with popular tools such as Jenkins, Bamboo, Circle CI, etc. to facilitate Continuous Delivery and DevOps workflows
- It offers parallel test execution across different environments
- Screenshots and videos are readily available for your test execution – you can configure them to be recorded for just test failures or for all test executions.
- In case you are wondering, what if I want to add custom functionality? Testsigma supports that too.
- Awesome support to help you at all steps of your test automation journey is what makes this deal a steal.
Take a deeper dive into the easy mobile test automation world with Testsigma
Check here the 3 Steps to Automate Mobile Applications Using Testsigma
3. TestComplete
TestComplete is an automated UI testing tool which is developed by SmartBear Software. It helps in creating, executing, and maintaining functional tests across the mobile, web, and desktop-based apps.
Features
- TestComplete allows you to develop test cases in various languages such as Java, Python, etc.
- It can record the key actions needed to replay the test
- It helps you take screenshots automatically during the test execution and playback
- It comes with a built-in code editor that allows testers to write scripts manually
This tool is pretty popular among the mobile automation testing tools, the only downside would be is – it is only for Windows and does not support Mac and there is not much support available through open communities.
4. UI Automator
UI Automator helps in creating functional Android UI test cases in order to test the user interface of an application.
Features
- It interacts with all the Android software and applications seamlessly and checks the interaction of the application under development with other apps.
- It works for all mobile devices that support Android version 4.1 or above.
- The good thing with UI Automator is that in case anything breaks, it is fixed almost immediately as it is maintained by Google.
UI Automator only supports the Java and Kotlin languages. To make this work efficiently, you would need to have good programming skills and deep knowledge of how Android works.
5. SeeTest
SeeTest is a popular mobile automation tool in the industry and supports both image-based and object-based recognition. It is used for automating Android, iOS, Windows and Blackberry applications.
Features
- SeeTest offers client libraries for C#, Java, Perl and Python for developing automation scripts>
- It allows you to run tests from your local IDE in parallel on a wide range of devices
- It has its own reporting mechanism which includes screenshots and video recording of tests performed
- It allows you to observe or debug running tests in the real-time
- Seamless integration with industry open-source tools such as Appium and Selenium
SeeTest, at the moment, does not support wi-fi connection to Android devices, though this feature is available for iOS devices. Additionally, the library or code file would need to compile with the actual application in order to get access to native objects.
6. Robotium
Robotium is one of the earliest Android test automation frameworks which is used to automate test cases for native and hybrid applications. It does not require any additional information about the application’s structure or executed classes as it is used for black-box testing.
Features
- Robotium tests are mainly composed in Java language
- It provides APIs to directly interact with UI controls within the app
- Robotium allows to compose framework, function, and user acceptance test situations
- It lets users write powerful test cases even with minimal knowledge of the app under the test
- It has a large community of open-source developers who contribute with the new features regularly in subsequent releases
Robotium does not have any record and play functions built in as such. For adding the ability to take screenshots, external libraries might be required.
7. XCUITest
XCUITest is a UI testing framework for iOS apps that was launched by Apple in 2015. It helps the developers and QAs to test the UI of native iOS applications by leveraging Swift or Objective C programming language.
Features
- XCUITest is specially designed to simplify UI testing for iOS applications
- As the XCUITest framework is specifically catered for iOS apps, the tests are stable, reliable, and performed faster
- It offers distributed parallel test running
- It comes with a built-in test recorder for tests, UI elements, and their characteristics
- Easy setup and maintenance as compared to other tools such as Apium
XCUITest does not have a large community and finding solutions to issues you may face can sometimes become tricky.
Test automation is a complex process and whether you will get success with it or not depends largely on the automation tools you choose. It is crucial to pay attention to the features of the automation tool before finally selecting it. If you are looking for a most efficient and comprehensive mobile app experience, you can reach out to experts at Testsigma.
