Which Mobile Automation Testing Tool is Popular Nowadays

it Due to the rapid growth of mobile application development, it is now more important than ever to conduct thorough testing using the best mobile testing techniques. The main tactics entail using a variety of mobile automated testing tools. Mobile application testing tools help organizations in mobile automation testing, reducing the added expense, time, and risk of human error.

What are Mobile Testing Tools?

Mobile testing employs tools or open-source frameworks to assess performance, usability, and functionality.

Mobile automation testing is essential in finding regression flaws and letting teams produce high-quality applications due to smartphones, tablet PCs, or every new iPhone version with minor changes.

Challenges while Performing Mobile Automation Testing

The difficulty of developing better mobile apps keeps rising as users become more accustomed to high-class apps. As a result, testing these apps presents more difficulties for the QA and automation teams.

The following five issues arise when conducting mobile automation testing:

• The exponential growth of devices globally

More than 1.5 billion smartphones were purchased worldwide in 2021. One can understand the diversity of cell phones worldwide, given the wide range of operating systems and the enormous number of devices and models. Evaluating a mobile app’s suitability for a particular OS and device presents a significant problem.

• Different types of mobile applications

Native apps, Hybrid apps, and Web apps are some subcategories of mobile applications. The backend team has challenges with each type because they need unique configurations and testing methods. Consider mixing two or more of these types; doing so will make manifolds more complex. To discover more about these apps, please read this blog post on Web vs. Hybrid vs. Native Apps.

• UI variations across different OS

Testing mobile apps can be complex because different operating systems have different user interfaces, as is well known. Moreover, due to these UI variations, every program has a different usage style and layout. Testing other user interfaces with such data is, therefore, quite complex.

• Security challenges

The most important issues to address are those that relate to security. Although public cloud-based apps and devices like LambdaTest, a mobile automation tool, may pose a security risk, easy cache access, bad encryption, etc. are a few examples.

• Too many choices

The number of mobile app automation testing technologies is exploding in the market. However, using only free public-cloud tools could lead to security vulnerabilities. Additionally, selecting one or more expensive tools could result in an error and damage the budget. Consequently, picking one that matches the requirements of a specific organization takes a lot of work.

Top Mobile Testing Tools

HCL One Test UI

HCL One Test UI can test the Android or iOS mobile applications by recording and playing mobile tests on Android devices or emulators, iOS mobile devices, or simulators. The tool automates and validates business process flows to ensure high-quality applications.

Feature Highlights

• Improve Speed and Coverage: Automate tests previously done by error-prone manual processes.
• Improve Quality: Achieve fast, comprehensive testing optimized for development environments while yielding higher-quality products.
• Reduce Cost: Find defects early when they’re less costly.
• Simplify Teamwork: Share tests seamlessly with the HCL OneTest Server collaboration framework.
• Automated testing of desktop, mainframe, mobile, and responsive HTML 5-based web applications4.
• Natural-language scripting environment, no programming knowledge needed.
• Integration with HCL OneTest Data for on-demand synthetic test data generation.

The Katalon Platform

An all-encompassing automation testing tool for mobile, online, API, and desktop is the Katalon Platform (Windows).

The most well-liked Appium substitute, Studio, does away with the difficulty of starting from scratch with a test automation framework and the need for programming requirements.

The studio is compatible with several operating systems and supports iOS and Android platforms (Windows, macOS, and Linux).

Feature Highlights

• Recording and playing back, pre-made project templates, built-in keywords, and quick test development
• Switch between manual and script mode to access low-code and scripting features.
• Execution on real devices, simulators, or custom cloud-based devices that is local, remote, and cross-environment (works with Sauces Lab, Kobiton, Perfecto, Lambda Test, etc.).
• Image-based testing to identify and record visual components.
• Designing a Page Object Model and restructuring objects to reduce maintenance requirements.
• Test object sharing for straightforward export and import of test artifacts between projects Built-in sophisticated reporting for actionable insights and quick problem-solving.

Adaptation to popular CI/CD systems (Jenkins, Bamboo, Travis CI, Azure DevOps, CircleCI, etc.)

Appium

Appium is a well-known and favored mobile test automation framework that emphasizes Selenium’s success. Using the WebDriver standard, Appium allows users to test native, hybrid, and mobile web apps.

Feature Highlights

• Languages for writing scripts include Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript, and C#.
• For those with previous Selenium experience, simple to adopt
• Eliminates the need to recompile frameworks, other code bases, or applications.
• Allows for test and code reuse across Windows, Android, and iO

Espresso

Espresso would not be a strange name to people who have created native Android applications. It is an Android test automation framework that Google created. It provides a versatile and simple API to build this platform-specific solution. However, it just executes Android UI tests and facilitates the expansion of the functionalities.

Feature Highlights

• Supports native apps that use Java and JUnit
• Using lightweight APIs will simplify maintenance.
• Synchronises UI elements and testing actions automatically
• Able to create APKs from Android UI testing
• Used frequently for unit and black-box testing

Robotium

Robotium manages native and hybrid mobile testing for Android v1.6 and later applications. The Android SDK, Eclipse, Android Development Kit, and JDK must be prepared for the setup.

Feature Highlights

• Java is a supported scripting language.
• Easy API for quick test generation
• used to create user acceptance tests, system tests, and functional tests
• supports both real devices and Android emulators for execution
• Supported CI/CD integration (Maven, Gradle, or ANT)

Conclusion

Automation of mobile app testing is a challenging task. It is possible to perform an efficient automation test utilizing tools that match the budget and selection criteria.

For an effective and timely automation project delivery that results in a stable and bug-free app and earns the appreciation and satisfaction of app users, several factors should be taken into consideration, including the availability of tools and their compatibility, network setup, environment setup, recording, and location elements on UI tricks, and system configuration for desktop and server machines.