Comparing Mobile Testing Tools

Due to an increase in the production of mobile phones by the companies, the market is flooded with devices, platforms, and versions which make it more essential for you to test your app thoroughly.

Mobile testing is more complicated than web testing, considering device fragmentation, different operating systems, and custom UIs. There are a number of high performing mobile testing tools that can be considered while devising a mobile testing methodology.

The article emphasizes on the five best mobile testing tools and a comparison between them.

Testsigma

Testsigma offers an intuitive, feature-rich, and affordable automated mobile app testing tool which ensures that your app works on every mobile device. Helps you build the most stable and reliable automated tests for mobile apps faster than ever. With a natural-language based test creation setup, it enables you to formulate test cases quickly using English statements.

The success or failure of an application largely depends on the number and varieties of devices it has been tested on. With Testsigma, you can run your tests concurrently across different devices with different versions which helps reduce the execution time by many folds. Faster execution means early detection of bugs and early introduction of user acceptance testing once the build is available.

Pros

i. Testsigma allows you to run tests on 2000+ real Android and iOS devices available on the cloud
ii. You can automate your mobile and web test cases from the same place
iii. You don’t need to worry about learning programming languages to work on Testsigma
iv. It helps run tests concurrently which helps reduce the execution time
v. Testsigma offers comprehensive test reports with multiple levels of drill-down to help you analyze test results quickly and efficiently
vi. Unlike various other tools, Testsigma supports both iOS and Android
vii. It does not require you to be a coding king
Saves on a lot of time

Cons

i. Though it is a commercial tool and the user needs to pay before using the tool, the cost it asks for is balanced out in the efficiency it delivers in other areas.

One of the best advantages of Testsigma which is missing in other top mobile testing tools is that you don’t require any tools or programming language to create and execute automated tests.

Appium

Appium Studio is a powerful open-source tool that lets you create automated tests for mobile web, automating native and hybrid apps on Android, iOs, and Windows platforms. It makes use of advanced object identification to get an understanding of your application’s structure before writing tests for it.

The tests created by Appium Studio or your existing Appium test scripts can be run in any tool which gives you an option to modify and reuse your test scripts in other projects easily.

Pros

i. Appium is a versatile automation tool having client libraries in Ruby, Java, Python, Javascript, PHP, C# which supports its extensions to Selenium WebDriver protocol
ii. It supports both iOS and Android and supports cross-platform testing
Appium provides a stable API which helps in maintaining the tests easily as it upgrades its underlying technology
iii. Since Appium leverages WebDriver protocol, it provides the most natural vocabulary for switching between a native app and web content

Cons

i. Integrations are limited to CI tools that too through Eclipse IDE and IntelliJ plugins
ii. Appium is programming intensive so for a person should be able to use appium efficiently, they should be well versed with the programming language they intend to use for test automation.
iii. The setup can be time consuming

Appium strives to build a thriving open-source community that can add real value to anyone who wants to test their mobile app.

XCUITest

If you are looking for an automation testing tool for iOS-based application, XCUITTest is Apple’s official UI testing tool. XCUITTest needs Xcode to run which means you need a Mac to run and its tests must be written in Swift or Objective-C.

Pros

i. It supports distributed parallel test running
ii. Stays within the Xcode environment
iii. Good documentation and tutorials are provided by Apple
iv. It has a built-in test recorder for simple tests, UI elements, and their characteristics
v. It can be used on simulators and real devices

Cons

i. It requires past exposure or background of iOS app development
ii. It is mainly used for unit testing only
iii. Due to the small community, it becomes difficult to get answers to your queries

UiAutomator

UiAutomator is not much popular among the users but it enables us to perform cross-app UI functional testing on applications. It is a mobile testing framework by Google as a part of the Android SDK manager.

UiAutomator is efficient in performing black-box testing and provides a GUI view of the UI components. It supports Java and Kotlin languages for writing the test cases.

Pros

i. It is directly supported and updated by Google
ii. As UiAutomator is a part of the Android SDK, it is fairly easy to set up and use
iii. It has a good source of documentation and tutorials provided by Google
iv. It gives a graphical view of UI components which helps to easily view components on the device

Cons

i. To use the tool, you need a background of Android app development
ii. This framework was built for developers instead of QA specialists
iii. Test speed is low as compared to Appium and Espresso

Espresso

Espresso is the official UI testing tool from Google and is only meant for testing Android apps. Espresso tests can only be written in Java and Kotlin. It has a different architecture where UI tests have access to shared code.

Pros

i. Offers enhanced support for newer Android versions
ii. Espresso is specially designed to enhance the speed of automation
iii. It has built-in support to ensure that the automation does not continue until a view is in the idle state which helps avoid automation bugs
iv. Automatic synchronization ability helps make the tests more stable
Can be used on emulators and real devices

Cons

i. It requires you to build an APK before start running your tests