Today we are extremely excited to announce the initial release of Appium on Sauce, a new way to automatically test your native and mobile web hybrid iOS apps in the cloud.
Appium on Sauce has its roots in Appium, an open source project written in Node.js that draws from Dan Cuellar's work on iOS Auto. Appium currently supports iOS testing with Android support in the works. Using the WebDriver JSON Wire Protocol to drive Apple’s UIAutomation, Appium takes Selenium commands from your app and translates those into a readable format for UIAutomation. With this seamless transition happening under the hood, Appium requires no recompiling or modifications to your app, and allows you to write tests in your favorite programming language and testing frameworks using the Selenium API and language-specific libraries.
Support for mobile web hybrid and native app testing has been on our radar screen for a while now, particularly since the Mobile Testing Summit, where we were first introduced to the project now known as Appium. Given its out-of-the-box compatibility with Selenium, goal of cross-platform support across iOS and Android, and flexible approach to automation, pairing Appium with our cloud to provide a turnkey service for automatically testing native and hybrid apps made perfect sense. And the best part? Appium on Sauce requires no setup or maintenance of iOS infrastructure. Tests can run in parallel across dozens of machines, allowing them to complete much faster than if they were running serially. Additionally, you can plug Appium on Sauce into your existing CI setup and let the cloud serve as your build server. To get a quick of idea of how Appium on Sauce works, check out the demo video below featuring Everest, an iPhone app that helps you achieve personal goals.For the next few weeks, Appium on Sauce will be available by invitation-only as we grow our ability to support more users. We expect to open up Appium on Sauce to everyone in the coming weeks so stay tuned to our blog and Twitter for an announcement on that. And in the meantime, if you're a Node developer working on a mobile app development or testing, please consider contributing to Appium to help make it better! Happy testing!
