Robotium and Appium: A comparison!

“The job of a quality assurance professional i.e., tester has been always underestimated by the developers of the industry until they understood and realized the true potential of testers in the software development life cycle. A quality output can never be achieved without a high quality of testing approach. Understanding the importance of testing and testers, industry has developed many testing software tools to make the testing process not only efficient and reliable but also common human error proof. Again industry released the importance and penetration of smart phones and smart devices and hence smart apps and smart sites which is the future of the industry. Hence smart app testing tools like Robotium and Appium get born in the industry. Automation tools that abridge mobile testing complications are used largely by the enterprises. Both Robotium and Appium are efficiently designed open source frameworks that render smooth mobile testing activities to the businesses. However, there are certain striking differences between the two – that not just make them competitive in the run, but also make them unique”.

The Foundation: They both are used for applications – Appium helps create automated tests for a range of mobile platforms while Robotium helps with Android applications as a developed, open source framework. The former enables testing through a simplified WebDriver interface, the latter gains popularity as the Selenium for Android. Both the automation testing tools are having a common intention that is to provide quality smart apps for the industry with efficient testing methodologies. They not only lessen the effort of the automation tester but also make the process much more efficient and accurate enough to meet the higher expectations of the industry. It even helps trim down the overall cost of mobile testing by a significant degree due to requirement of low resources and less time for the testing process.

Support for Mobile Platforms: Here is a major difference for the developers. Robotium extends its support to different versions of Android OS. As a result, mobile app developers find it easier to experiment and conceptualize a range of Android applications using this particular framework. It is like a boon for the mobile app testers of the industry due to high degree of reliability and efficiency of the automation testing tool. On the other hand, Appium is considered wider in its approach. The platform lends support to iOS, Firefox OS and even Android. In fact Appium is considered as a cross platform mobile testing tool for the industry. This is highly motivating in nature due to its adoptability with the demand of the application and of course platform.

Type of Application: The automation testing tool, Robotium, enables users to test native as well as hybrid mobile applications for Android operating system. However, Appium goes further by allowing developers to evaluate web applications and native plus hybrid mobile apps. Users can even rely on the framework to manage Safari and Chrome on mobile devices. Hence we can say Appium is for every type of smart apps starting from native app, web app and hybrid app that too for all platforms including Android whereas Robotium is for Android only.

Programming Language: With Robotium, users can write test cases mere in Java (enabling test writing just from a set of programming languages). Java makes the testing approach and test case creation not only easier but also effort less due to its inbuilt functionalities for which java is famous in the industry. It really make sense for java background testers having keen interest to stick with the most popular smart operating system of the industry i.e., Google’s Android. But, Appium lets developers write test cases in a wide variety of programming languages – which is basically any language that is compatible with WebDriver. Some of the languages supported by these include Java, JavaScript with Node.js, Python, PHP, Objective-C, Ruby, Perl, and C#. In fact, the programming language needed in Appium to create the test case is the same language as that of the application itself being developed.

Performance: For any business that needs good performance while testing mobile applications, both Appium and Robotium are efficient choices. However, they both lack record & play functionality – as a result of which, it may hamper the performance objectives for most developers. But performance-wise, the tools enable seamless mobile testing and ensure safety from bugs and errors. So we can say its like a tie condition between these two industry leading mobile automation testing tool.

Restrictions of the frameworks: While the obvious difference between the frameworks lies in the operating system that they both individually lend support to, there are some other limitations too. Robotium makes developers work with the source code as they automate tests and may at times complicate the user’s interaction with system software. Appium, whereas, comes with restricted support for XPath on mobile devices. Some developers may even have issues with the inadequacy and the quality of the test reports generated by this framework. Besides platform, we must consider the programming knowledge requirement from the automation tester’s point of view. In Robotium the tester needn’t to bother about any extra knowledge on programming languages where as for Appium, the tester needs to learn the programming language on which the application is being developed. So it’s like a win – lose condition for both mobile testing tools.

Ease of Use: Ease of use is treated as the most important feature of any software application tool or framework in the IT industry. This is because it plays an extremely important role while choosing any software application tool for our purpose. Obviously if we don’t have multiple options then we have to compromise on ease of use feature but that is a rare case in the industry. So to attract developers or testers, the software tool must be user friendly enough. Finally, if there’s anything left that the businesses should know – then it is undoubtedly the ease of use put forth by both these open source frameworks. Appium is an amazing mobile testing tool which simplifies the process in many ways – support for various languages further make it score higher than most other frameworks. The Android Selenium, on the other hand, is easy to use but understands only Android versions. In a nutshell though, both are pretty good choices as mobile testing frameworks – all that the developer needs to know is what kind of a project are they trying to accomplish!

Mindfire Solutions has great expertise in mobile app development on a number of mobile operating systems. If you need help to develop mobile apps and thoroughly test them before putting them up in the marketplace, you could just reach out to us at sales at Mindfire Solutions dot com.