Learn about Appium

Appium is an automation program designed to let you run automated tests on mobile devices and simulators/emulators. QA teams and developers use Appium to interact with both iOS and Android devices, mimicking the actions of real users: tapping elements, swiping, entering text and more.

There are several advantages in using Appium:

• It is open source, which means it's free
• Compatible with all iOS and Android devices, even tvOS and Android TV
• It uses the same WebDriver protocol as Selenium, which means the Selenium bindings can be used to interact with devices through Appium

Appium 1 comes with all the necessary drivers by default, to interact with Android and iOS devices and emulators/simulators. These drivers include:

• uiAutomator2 for Android automation
• XCUITest support for iOS, through the use of WebDriverAgent and appium-xcuitest-driver

For Appium 2, you will need to install these drivers yourself:

• appium driver install uiautomator2
• appium driver install xcuitest

Simulators versus Physical Devices

You can choose to run tests against either iOS simulators and Android emulators, or physical mobile devices. Appium providers support for both sim/emu and physical device testing.

Appium Inspector

The GUI utility, called Appium Inspector allows for inspecting the mobile apps that you want to test. This easy to use utility offers as live view of the app and allows you to click elements to retrieve their locators.

These locators are necessary to use in your test scripts, to let Appium know which component you are interacting with.