Mobile is very rapidly becoming the biggest medium to reach the consumers as the adoption of mobile phones is increasing. A Mobile App or Mobile web application is the platform which enables you to get connected with your desired audience. Consumers use various different platforms and devices to access your mobile apps. So in this age of multi-platform and mass adoption, are your apps cross-platform? Are your apps tested for cross-platform? Are you delivering the best experience to your users irrespective of the device varieties in today’s world?

Testing of Mobile Apps in quite cumbersome because of sheer magnitude of testing required on variety of devices. Moreover, Mobile Apps require changes faster than other kind of Applications (Web or Desktop). That’s the reason, more and more organizations have started realizing the need of using automation testing as much as possible.

  Mobile App Automation Testing can be a massive undertaking, and if unaware, one can end up complicating the process by selecting a bad tool. With a major trending shift to open-source mobile test automation tools, there have been a plethora of tools available in most open-source software markets.

  So how do you know which are the best tool available in the market? Which tools will give you the most efficient solution to fulfill your enterprise’s need for speed and integration?

  This blog post is to help you quickly choose which open-source test automation tool will be right for your automation testing.

You would need a set of criteria to fulfil when assessing your selection of the right open-source automation tool. Here are a crucial few questions to ask:

• Do you have the required skilled resource for automation tasks?
• Is there ease of script development to support agile processes and shorter iteration cycles?
• Does the tool support cross team collaboration for seamless use by QA and Dev?
• Can it match app platform with test development language?
• Will it have performance capabilities gaps while testing?
• Will it support both real devices and emulators?
• Does the app support multiple platforms — Mobile and Web?
• Does it have multi device execution capability
• How easily can it integrated with external Device cloud platforms?

There are many tools and automation frameworks we use, however Appium is always preferred as the leading automation tool and Core Java as automation scripting language to test both Android and iOS based apps. Appium is the leading cross-platform solution for mobile test automation, and we experienced it why.

Appium is an open source, cross-platform mobile test automation tool to automate the testing for native, hybrid and mobile web applications. Appium comes with support for Android, iOS on real devices as well as simulators and emulators. At core, Appium is nothing but an HTTP server written in node.js. In working, it almost acts same as Selenium which perceives http requests from selenium client libraries and it handles those requests in different ways depending upon the platforms.

Appium is one of the best options available today in the market and is widely adopted by the organizations for their mobile test automation needs. Also with growing supporter base and stronger community, it is getting easier for enterprises to adopt it. Appium lets you write the tests in any language which is supported by Selenium, using the WebDriver API. If you are trying to test the Andoird Apps then, Appium automates it using the UIAutomator library, which is part of the Android SDK. So the learning curve is a bit easier if you have already used Selenium. The ease of testing both Android and iOS apps makes it one of the best cross-platform tool. You can run your test either on Emulators or on Real devices with Appium using the WebDriver JSON Wire protocol.