Running APPIUM, for iOS and Android mobile automation testing
1.1 What is Appium? Appium is an open source test automation tool developed and supported by Sauce Labs to automate native and hybrid mobile apps. It is basically know as a Cross-Platform Mobile Automation Tool. It uses JSON wire protocol internally to interact with iOS and Android native apps using the Selenium WebDriver . There are many other automation tools available in market to automate mobile native apps like MonkeyTalk, KIF, Calabash and Frank but most of those tools require an extra agent needs to be compiled with your application code so that the tool can interact with the mobile app. So here the problem is the app which you will be testing is not the same app which you will be submitting in the App Store as you would need to remove those automation agent libraries before submitting the app. Automating hybrid and native mobile applications for Android and iOS is a key function handled by Appium , a node.js server. One of the core tenets of Appium