Introduction to Mobile Test Automation

Before the mobile application development boom, we have explored and tried every bit of web application testing and kind of conquered that space. Wondering what makes mobile app test automation challenging?

Couple of things, which I would want to highlight here:

• Never ending screen size and form factors
• Apps hosted in a sandboxed environment and very limited inter process communication
• Network Challenges
• Usability aspect of mobile and the complexity in terms of navigation
• Lack of easy to use API

While in this book we are not going to discuss all of these but look into one aspect of the challenge which is "lack of easy to use api". Appium is very popular because of api's which are similar to that of Selenium.

All the instructions mentioned here after are tested on Mac OSX version (10.10).