.png){kind=logo}
Mobile applications have become an integral part of our daily lives, and it's crucial to ensure their quality and performance. To achieve this, test automation is a key approach. Appium is a widely recognized open-source test automation framework known for its versatility in testing mobile applications across platforms and reducing development and testing time.
Appium has gained widespread popularity because it offers cross-platform support, allowing you to test your mobile apps across operating systems like Android and iOS. Moreover, it seamlessly integrates with various programming languages, making it a versatile choice for mobile app testing.
Appium, when combined with a reliable real device cloud, enhances the mobile app testing process and ensures that your mobile apps undergo thorough testing in real-world scenarios, delivering high-quality applications that consistently provide an exceptional user experience.
In this post, we're going to take a look at mastering Appium automation and how to perform automated app testing using Appium with LambdaTest real device testing cloud.
Appium stands out as a prominent open-source framework designed for automating a wide range of applications, including native, mobile web, and hybrid ones. It offers compatibility with the Android mobile, iOS mobile, and Windows desktop platforms.
Initially developed by Dan Cuellar and Jason Huggins, Appium has now gained substantial popularity in the developer community, amassing approximately 17k+ Stars and 5.9k+ Forks on GitHub.
It excels in being cross-platform, ensuring its applicability across diverse environments. Moreover, Appium supports various widely used programming languages, such as Java, Python, JavaScript, and more, making it accessible to a broader range of developers for app test automation.
Essentially, Appium is an HTTP server that leverages the REST API. When you use Appium, the client communicates with this server via REST APIs, which are controlled by the Mobile JSON Wire Protocol. These REST APIs serve as a bridge: they accept connections from the client, listen for commands, carry out these commands, and then report back on whether the commands were successfully executed.
The initial stage of this communication process begins with creating a session. The client starts this session by sending a request to the server containing session-related details organized as key-value pairs, known as Desired Capabilities.
These Desired Capabilities help Appium distinguish between iOS and Android platforms and set up a session on the desired device, simulator, or emulator. Once this session is established, the client and the Appium server use this session ID as a reference point for their interactions.
Appium provides a load of advantages for mobile automation. Let's go on to explore these benefits in greater detail while using Appium for automation:
Compatibility Across Platforms: Appium allows you to automate across iOS, Android, and Windows platforms. The best part is that you can achieve this using a codebase, which reduces the effort required to maintain test scripts for each platform.
Open-Source: One of the things about Appium is that it is an open-source framework. This means that it is freely available and can be customized according to your needs. Additionally, there is a community that contributes to its development, thus ensuring improvements and updates.
Language Flexibility: Appium supports programming languages while giving you the flexibility to choose the one that aligns with your team's skills or project requirements. Whether you're working with Java, Python, Ruby, or any other programming language, you can leverage Appium's phenomenal capabilities without limitations.
Support for Real Devices, Emulators, and Simulators: Appium offers the flexibility to conduct testing on both real devices and emulators/simulators, thus ensuring a thorough evaluation across various environments.
Choosing cloud testing platforms for Appium automation on real devices offers several advantages. Firstly, cloud platforms provide access to a wide range of real devices, ensuring comprehensive test coverage across different configurations. This diversity is cost-effective since it eliminates the need for acquiring and managing devices in-house.
Secondly, these platforms offer scalability, allowing you to quickly scale up or down based on testing requirements. This flexibility ensures faster test execution and accommodates varying workloads. Additionally, cloud testing platforms enable parallel testing on multiple devices concurrently, reducing test execution time. They also maintain devices, handle updates, and provide 24/7 availability, ensuring devices are in optimal condition and accessible at all times.
Furthermore, these platforms often offer seamless integration with Appium and other automation frameworks, simplifying test setup and execution. Detailed reporting, logs, and screenshots are typically provided, aiding debugging and analysis.
In the next section, we will look at how to leverage cloud-based testing platforms like LambdaTest to run Appium automated tests at scale.
LambdaTest is one such cloud-based AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform Appium automation on a real device cloud of 3000+ real browsers, devices, and platforms. Here are some striking features you can find in LambdaTest's Appium automation platform:
Cross Browser and Cross Platform Testing: LambdaTest allows you to effortlessly conduct Appium automation tests across a range of browsers and operating systems. This enables you to test your applications on different versions of Android and iOS as well as multiple browser versions, thus ensuring compatibility across various platforms.
Scalability: One advantage of LambdaTest is its scalable cloud infrastructure. This enables you to run your Appium tests concurrently on devices and browsers, reducing testing time and enhancing test coverage.
Real Device Testing: LambdaTest provides access to a library of real Android and iOS devices for testing purposes. By conducting tests on different devices, you can quickly identify potential issues that may not be evident, especially during emulator or simulator testing. Thus, simulating real-world scenarios becomes more effective.
Emulators and Simulators: Apart from real devices, LambdaTest also offers virtual emulators and simulators for Appium testing. This allows you to test on various Android Emulators and iOS Simulators.
Integration with CI/CD Tools: LambdaTest integrates with popular continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools such as Jenkins, Travis CI, CircleCI, and more. This enables you to automate your Appium tests as part of your development workflow.
Test Automation Frameworks: LambdaTest supports other test automation frameworks, like TestNG and JUnit, thus simplifying the process of writing and executing automated tests for your mobile applications.
Scalable Pricing Model: LambdaTest offers super flexible pricing plans catering to small teams and large enterprises, making it cost-effective for organizations of varying sizes.
Here are the steps to perform Appium automation on LambdaTest real device cloud.
1. Sign up for free on LambdaTest and login to your account.
2. To get started, make sure you have a LambdaTest username and access key. You can obtain these credentials by navigating to your Profile icon on the top-right and then Account Settings > Password & Security tab.
3. Additionally, ensure that you have the Appium Java client library installed and access to either an Android app in .apk or .aab format or an iOS app in .ipa format.
4. Now upload your iOS application (.ipa file) or Android application (.apk file) to LambdaTest servers via REST API.
Below is a sample cURL request for uploading your app using LambdaTest REST API:
Using App File from System:
Using App URL:
5. Configure the Appium capabilities within your test scripts. Shown below are the sample desired capabilities. Here, we set custom capabilities such as platformName, platformVersion, deviceName, and the app URL (previously generated).
To run tests on a real device cloud, we set the isRealMobile to true.
Here is the sample Java test script configured with the above capabilities.
6. Now run your test case and visit the LambdaTest App Automation Dashboard to view your test execution results.
In a nutshell, becoming skilled in Appium automation and utilizing real device cloud testing with platforms like LambdaTest opens up a world of possibilities for software developers and testers.
By harnessing the capabilities of Appium and LambdaTest, teams can streamline their testing processes to enhance the quality of their applications and ultimately provide user experiences.
Appium with LambdaTest offers an adaptable solution to meet these requirements. So whether you're a tester or an aspiring developer embracing these tools, it can significantly impact your journey towards delivering flawless mobile applications.
