I would like to share the KATALON mobile testing tool which is great and easy to integrate with clouds like Kobiton, BrowserStack… and mobile library or tools like Appium, Robotium…
Appium: Appium is an open source cross-platform test automation framework to use with native, hybrid and mobile web apps.
It drives iOS and Android apps using the WebDriver JSON Wire Protocol. It’s a black-box testing tool, no need for the source code.
The idea behind Appium that testing native apps shouldn’t require including an SDK or recompiling the app. You should also be able to use test practices, frameworks and tools you prefer.
With Appium you can automate any mobile app from up to now many languages and many test frameworks with full access to back-end APIs and DBs from test code.
Robotium: Robotium is an open source mobile testing automation framework for native and hybrid Android apps. With it’s very easy to write powerful a robust automatic black-box UI tests for apps: you just need the .apk, no source code is needed. You can also run gray-box tests if the source code is available. It provides simple API to write UI automation scripts. Robotium is in fact one of the most commonly used automated UI testing framework.
Katalon is also my favorite mobile testing tool that uses Appium, Node JS as base. Whatever can be done with Appium will be supported by Katalon. It supports both Android and iOS.
it supports lot of features, which are impressive.
Tests Recording- If you are not a Tester, who can do coding stuff, this is awesome feature. You can record both WebApps and Mobile Apps.
Object Repository Approach: You can spy the Web and Mobile Apps and add objects to your repository, and use it in your script. Someone who has worked in QTP a lot like me, would simply love this feature!
CI: Continuous Integration with tools like Jenkins almost very easily from the studio.
Code Repo: It supports GIT. That is also pretty much easy to use feature from the studio.
Data driven Testing: It lets you do, data driven Testing, with excel files, very easily, without much coding like creating objects to Excel file, creating instance etc…
Screenshots: Though this is offered by many other similar tools, this is also available.With a simple command. Mobile.Takescreenshot().
Debug Perspective: Yet another common but helpful feature is available
and many more cool features are available.
Especially if your project contains Mobile apps and web-service or Web-app and Web-service, using a tool like Katalon, would help you a lot in making Web-service and app talking with each other thro’ variables.
+1 for KATALON – much has been said, and I too have found it to be the epitome of test frameworks on the market, and lord knows I’ve messed with a few.
I remember when I first started researching mobile automation I came across the following (going waaay back):
MonkeyTalk for native apps - while effective for straight-forward apps, it was a challenge for custom apps
Robot Framework - another challenging framework when it came to dealing with native android apps
UIAutomate (iOS) - pre iOS 9, it was a solid framework; the de facto solution for our iOS apps
UIAutomator (iOS) - post iOS 9, it was still a reliable framework to use
Espresso (Android) - meant as a way to write unit tests, I found Espresso easy to learn, but frustrating to employ as it relied on page objects that were not always identified properly in a custom android app
… there are some proprietary frameworks I’ve used but the only thing I can say about them is they were a great foundation when I became a F/T QA Engineer. I had to learn JS real-quick.
In recent months, our team have opportunity to work on automation mobile testing but unfortunately, Client provided us web application was build from old techniques like Extended Javascsript, so there are some objects could found in Dom, but when automate with real devices - they could not be clicked
And Katalon is first framework that we have tried - below is some result for everyone to reference
Katalon + BrowserStack: Work very well on iPhone (iOs 11), but not work stable on Ipad, off course, need budget to buy account
Katalon + SauceLabs: It is simulator, you need to buy account to able to test with real devices and cost for 1 Mac machine as Katalon does not work with SauceLabs on Window
Katalon + Kobiton: Kobiton work well with JavaScript - Node.Js but Katalon only support Java and Groovy languages, Kobiton coud not work stable on Groovy.
So for me, option number 1 maybe is the best choice until now.