Introduction to Appium (Series)

Appium is an open source tool for automating mobile applications which can be

• Native
• Hybrid
• Web

Appium supports platforms such as

• Android
• iOS
• Firefox OS

Appium Philosophy

Appium was designed to meet mobile automation needs according to a philosophy outlined by the following four tenets:

1. You shouldn’t have to recompile your app or modify it in any way in order to automate it.
2. You shouldn’t be locked into a specific language or framework to write and run your tests.
3. A mobile automation framework shouldn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to automation APIs.
4. A mobile automation framework should be open source, in spirit and practice as well as in name!

Shouldn’t have to recompile your app

We don’t have to recompile or modify anything in our Application Under Test (AUT) to perform automated test with Appium, since Appium under the hood uses the vendor specific frameworks meaning

• Android – UIAutomator (developed by Android developers)
• iOS – UIAutomation (developed by Apple Inc)

Shouldn’t be locked into a specific language

Since Appium has extended WebDriver client library, Appium also supports all the languages which webdriver supports like

• Java
• C#
• Ruby
• Python etc

Shouldn’t reinvent the wheel

Appium has extended the WebDriver JSON Wire Protocol with some additional API specific for mobile purpose, hence the standard is still the same as WebDriver, hence satisfying the third philosophy

Should be open source

As we already know, Appium is Open source, hence satisfying the 4^th rule. Here is the complete video of the above discussion. Thanks for reading the post and watching the video !!! Please leave your comments and let me know if there is anything I should update in this post. Thanks, Karthik KK