Introduction to Appium: A Guide for Mobile App Testing

What is Appium? 

• Appium is an open-source tool to automate the mobile application.
• With help of an appium we can automate native, mobile web, and hybrid applications.
• Supports iOS mobile, Android mobile, and Windows desktop platforms.
• Supports multiple programming languages.

Read more about Appium: Official Website

Native, Web and Hybrid Applications

Native Apps: Calculator, Camera and Calendar.
Web Apps: That you access via your phone browsers on Chrome, safari
Hybrid Apps: Combination of Native and Web Apps.

History of Appium

• Appium was originally developed by Dan Cuellar in 2011 under the name “iOSAuto”, written in the C# programming language.
• The program was open-sourced in August 2012 using the Apache 2 license.
• Sauce Labs agreed to fund Appium’s development and motivated its code to be rewritten using js

Multiple programming languages

• Java
• Python
• C#
• Ruby
• PHP
• Java Script (Community based)
• Robot framework (Community based)

Appium Design

First, we have Web Driver script. Appium actually uses the selenium wed driver library. It is the reason that is use in all programming languages that supports by selenium webdriver.

We will write our script here in webdriver script library and using the webdriver wire protocol which is also called JSON Rest wire protocol. Our script which is written in any language are converted into HTTP Rest based request which is understood by appium server and then appium automate the application using Native Automate Framework.

Native Automation Framework

Read more about Automation Framework

How Appium Works?

• Appium works in a client – server architecture
• Appium is an ‘HTTP Server’ written using – Node.js platform
• Install Appium using below Commands

$ npm install -g appium
$ appium

Desired Capabilities

Desired capabilities are a set of keys and values (i.e., a map or hash) sent to the Appium server to tell the server what kind of automation session we’re interested in starting up.

Read more about Desired capabilities

Example of Amazon Android Application

{
“appium:deviceName”: “SM-G965F”,
“appium:udid”: “2135c13a357ece”,
“platformName”: “Android”,
“appium:platformVersion”: “10”,
“appium:appPackage”: “in.amazon.mShop.android.shopping”,
“appium:appActivity”: “com.amazon.mShop.splashscreen.StartupActivity”,
“appium:noReset”: “True”
}

How to Setup Appium on Windows?

Tools Required

• Appium Server
• Appium Inspector
• Android Studio or sdk
• Eclipse or IntelliJ Idea or Any other IDEs

Step-by-Step to setup Appium on windows machine

Links:- 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-hBpgM5je8&list=PLhW3qG5bs-L8npSSZD6aWdYFQ96OEduhk&index=3

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i68DZ9qbvnk&list=PLFGoYjJG_fqqgd1JLjg6Vc0r5N4yhQ9Dm&index=2