Mobile Testing With Appium: 3 Advance Automation Techniques

Mobile application testing refers to a process where the application software of mobiles are tested for their functionalities, durability, and consistency. The testing could be done manually or on an automated basis. Appium is the automation framework that is widely used for testing mobile applications. One can perform mobile testing with Appium by testing the entire system of an app. It could perform both Cross iOS and Android test automation as well as Mobile hybrid application testing.

Appium is based on the remote WebDriver protocol. One can write the tests in JavaScript, Perl, Java, Python, C#, etc. Let’s say you tested the functionality of a mobile app. But even if you perform the testing today, it’s automatically going to change shortly as a part of advancement. In that case, Appium addresses such future advancements in technology with sheer preciseness.

Let’s take a ride to understand the 3 advanced Appium automation techniques that help in automation testing of your mobile apps and making them run smoothly on platforms. 

3 Appium Automation Techniques

Below are the Appium automation techniques:

1. Using API 

Appium performs mobile testing using the WebDriver agent. It is considered the most advanced Appium automation technique. Many events are happening whenever the Appium script runs to perform actions on an application that is under testing. One of the occurring events is to bundle the WebDriver agent. It is further installed on the real device or the simulator. All of this requires a little time which is measured with the “log timestamp” capability. It is still difficult to understand the time taken by a certain process.

Beginning a test system presumably required two seconds on test system A and most likely five seconds on the test system B. In any case, on the off chance that we have different test systems going, it will be troublesome. 

How Events API help?

Appium’s Events API will address is this wreck. It will assist us with seeing better what amount of time the test system A required to begin and test system B took to begin. So you can utilize Appium Events API, which has inbuilt occasions called worker occasions. One of the worker occasions is only avoided definite recovery. Test system beginning time is another worker occasion. These are a portion of the worker occasions that Appium gives us as a matter of course. 

In any case, there are likewise custom occasions. Here’s an illustration of a custom occasion: you need to see how an application requires to explore from screen A to screen B. It’s very conceivable to see what amount of time this route requires from screen A to screen B utilizing Appium Events API. 

This custom occasion can be characterized by the merchant and an occasion name. This is to empower some separation between Appium zone worker occasions, similar to test system start time, and our custom occasions explicit to our application. Here we have a characterized set merchant which is VodQA, one of the example applications that we will illustrate (see beneath). What’s more, the occasion name is OnLoginScreen. 

We can begin giving occasion names and afterward log these occasions at whatever point we feel that we explored from screen A to screen B. At that point, we can log another occasion to see how long that we went through on the subsequent screen. It gives us a thought of what amount of time a specific occasion requires in robotizing our application under test.

2. Using Face-ID

One new element from Appium is in-application verification utilizing face ID. A lot of utilizations use face ID for marking in or to play out an installment. So it is significant for face ID to work impeccably. Appium can uphold testing in-application verification on iOS test systems utilizing face ID. Also, it upholds contact ID verification on more established iOS gadgets. 

Face ID uphold is just on iOS test systems, not on genuine gadgets. Furthermore, it has just three restricted controls: 

1. Unmatching the face.
2. Selecting the face, which is like checking a face during gadget arrangement and empowering the component through and through.
3. Coordinating of the face.

Appium carefully observes W3C principles, which is the WebDriver convention. Also, a portion of these highlights of in-application validation utilizing face ID is not characterized in the W3C standard. Appium gives another method of using these sorts of highlights explicit to the stage, which is utilizing versatile supporting strategies. 

Mobile Supporting Methods 

Appium characterizes its API and opens us to the external world utilizing portable supporting strategies. 

One is “sendBiometricMatch” which takes up two contentions: 

1. Face ID and the specific incentive for it very well may be valid or bogus to play out an ideal match.
2. Play out a non-coordinating face to sort out how the application carries on when we do a face bungle.

There’s another versatile supporting strategy explicit to selecting the biometric. It takes up the contention of ‘is empowered.’ It can be either obvious or bogus. Furthermore, it is alright to empower this on various occasions — the test systems are adequately smart to get it. Yet, in a legitimate case, it is a great idea to interject likely once per test, or once out and out. And afterwards, we can utilize a “send biometric jumble.” Once it is empowered, we can send genuine face ID validation either evident or bogus utilizing the portable supporting strategy called “sendBiometricmismatch.” Face-ID has proven to be the most feasible Appium automation technique because of its access to every layman. 

3. Streaming Apps

With Appium, there are two diverse APIs for when you start and stop video recording. Be that as it may, there is a favorable position with this. When you begin recording your screen, you can hit a particular port on your program, where the particular screen is being shown. Suppose you move from screen one to screen two. You can regularly really see those routes of the screen from your gadget onto the program. Furthermore, how is this incident? 

In the engine, it utilizes FFmpeg in the worker, and this streams it into the program. What’s more, on the off chance that you need this element to be useful with your Appium rendition, all you require to do is you need to introduce FFmpeg on your machine, and it ought to be in the way so Appium can find it. 

Streaming Devices 

If you are running tests across gadgets, you might be thinking about how to arrange the port numbers. On the off chance that it is one gadget, of course, Appium begins this FFmpeg worker on 9100, so on the off chance that you investigate your Appium logs, you could see a ton of data there. 

On the off chance that you are running your tests across numerous test systems or gadgets, and you need to take a gander at your screen on the program. All things considered, you need to give extraordinary, novel ports. You could do this through another capacity called the end MJPEG worker URL. You can take a gander at a capacity list — they are more than 280 abilities for the two iOS and Android together. You could see that there is a capacity for this, where you can set the port number to an arbitrary one and it will stream a particular gadget screen onto your program. 

Shouldn’t Something be Said About Android? 

Presently what befalls Android? For Android, we don’t have direct APIs, which we could utilize. In any case, there are outsider streaming applications you can introduce on your gadget and start your streaming and you could get the port number and do precisely the equivalent for how we managed iOS. 

On the off chance that you need to find out about how we do this for Android and what kind of streaming applications are there, you should go to the Appium Pro blog, by Jonathan Lipps. All these Appium automation techniques make your mobile app testing smooth and ensure the reliable functioning of the device. Make use of these techniques to let your device maintain its consistency for a lifetime giving you a better experience. 

Also read: 

Mobile App Testing Strategies

Appium for Android Testing

Mobile Automation with Appium

Appium Mobile Testing