Android and Appium: Press Enter on the soft keyboard

Problem: Use Appium and press ‘Enter’ on the soft keyboard. This post continues our series on intermediate level problems when automating mobile application tests using Appium. We thought of sending a KeyEvent to an input (textbox) element using Appium. Superficially this appears to be trivial, but while writing the script, figured out otherwise. To our surprise, it failed. And there […]

Python Appium tests on different Android versions

Problem: UI element identifiers are not consistent across mobile platforms. Mobile is eating the world. However mobile operating systems are not yet fully mature. For example, UI element identifiers change between versions of the same OS. They also look different across Android and iOS. This causes automation scripts to be brittle. We hit this problem recently. We were writing automation […]

Android unit testing: Android testing framework and Robolectric

Problem: There are not many good tutorials on Android unit testing Android applications are written in Java. So you probably think if you know JUnit, you can unit test Android applications. Surprise! JUnit is not sufficient for unit testing Android applications. Junit works when the code runs within a JVM. Android applications interact with the Android OS. So you need […]

Ways to identify UI elements in mobile apps

Problem: Many testers do not know how to identify UI elements in mobile apps. In this post, I explain about different ways to find UI elements in Android’s calculator app. I also show you examples of using Appium’s API with the different locator strategies. Why this post? Identifying UI elements is a key component of writing UI automation. Most testers […]

Appium tutorial: Execute Python tests on mobile devices

This Appium tutorial will show you how to run automated tests on a real physical device. We estimate skimming through this post will take you 10 minutes. We estimate working through this post, step by step, will take you about 90 minutes. In this post we will cover getting setup with Appium, interfacing with real devices, writing and running Appium […]

Mobile automation: Run Appium tests on Sauce Labs

Problem: Maintaining infrastructure for testing your mobile applications on different platforms and browser versions is time consuming. Why this post? This post was written for the hands on tester looking to explore different tools testers can use for mobile automation. In this post we will show you how to run your Appium tests on Sauce Labs. We estimate that you […]