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Posted August 15, 2014

Appium + Sauce Labs Integration

'Appy Friday! Sauce Labs' Support Team wants to help our customers easily ramp up their mobile automated testing, so we put together this easy guide to Sauce integration with Appium. We hope you find it to be informative. If you have any remaining questions about Sauce Labs' integration with Appium, feel free to leave a note in the comments. - Cheers, the Support Team at Sauce Background info: What is Appium? Appium is an open-source tool that you can use to automate tests for mobile native, mobile web, and mobile hybrid applications. Just like Selenium Webdriver - which is an open-source tool that you can use to to automate web app tests - Appium is an automation library that you can use to automate tests for mobile applications. Other details:

It is cross-platform. This allows you to write tests against multiple platforms (iOS, Android), using the same API.
It is not locked into a specific language or framework for writing and running your tests.
It was created by extending the Selenium Webdriver JSON Wire Protocol with extra API methods that are useful for mobile automation.
Mobile Native Applications vs Mobile Web Applications vs Mobile Hybrid Applications

Types of mobile applications:

Mobile Native Applications: Native apps can use all the features from your device, such as the camera, audio, microphone, and more. These applications work on a specific platform (i.e iOS or Android). Use the respective platform Software Development Kit (SDK) to develop them. Once they’re released for public use, users install the application on their respective devices through an application store (e.g. Google Play or Apple’s App Store).
Mobile Web Applications: These ones are a little tricky; instead of being an application that you download on your device, mobile web applications are a mobile website that you can access through a browser on your mobile device (e.g. Safari or Chrome). The advantage to creating and using these is that they are not platform-specific, which means that you should be able to access this application from any mobile platform (i.e. iOS or Android). Unfortunately, these applications have limitations when it comes to using a device’s internal features.
Mobile Hybrid Applications: As the name indicates, mobile hybrid applications are part mobile native app and part mobile web app. Just as with mobile native applications, you can find and download mobile hybrid applications using an application store (e.g. Google Play or Apple’s App Store), you can access them through icons on your device, and the app is be able to use all of a device’s features, such as the camera, audio, microphone, etc. In the same manner as a mobile web app, a mobile hybrid application looks like a mobile website that can be accessed through a browser, but in this case the browser is an embedded webview within the application that would just allow to display some HTML. A good example of a mobile hybrid app is that from a banking institution. It provides a user with the mobile native application perks while simply rendering pages from their website.

Appium with Sauce Labs In certain cases, Sauce Labs uses Appium as the server for our latest iOS simulators and Android emulators. This means that whenever you run a test in Sauce Labs specifying any of the following mobile platforms, Appium is the automation tool in the background that starts and drives the simulator or emulator for your test. Sauce Labs platforms that use Appium Mobile Native Applications