Let me commence this post by throwing out some buzzword: DevOps! Continuous Delivery! Agile! There. Now that we ’ ve dispensed with SEO pleasantry we can have an honest chat. There are a lot of selection when it arrive to limit up your mobile screen model and environment. Chief among these choices is what to rely on as your mechanization engine: Appium, XCUITest, Espresso, Earl Grey, Detox ... the list goes on. Which technology to base your test suite on is a fundamental and significant choice, because once you ’ ve got a bunch of code sunk into using one of these engines, it ’ s not easy to switch.

The value proffer of these tools are different enough that it has led some to declare the & quot; fall of Appium & quot; in favor of something newer. Certainly, XCUITest and Espresso hold grown in popularity as Apple and Google respectively have offered them to their developer. The reward of these frameworks is their tight integrating with the codification which covering developer themselves are compose. But it ’ s a mistake to think of Appium as basically competing with XCUITest and Espresso. In fact, Appium is make on XCUITest (for iOS)! And there is an Espresso driver in beta, useable for anyone to try out right now. One of Appium & # x27; s core value propositions is precisely that it doesn ’ t compete head-on with the vendor-provided puppet. Appium is three things:

1. A WebDriver interface on top of whatever the best automation tech du jour is (XCUITest, Espresso, etc ...).

2. A collection of helpful functionality built on top of these tools, to enable an extended feature set or to cover over any flakiness or flaws in the underlying engine.

3. A community of practician that embody an incredible amount of noesis about wandering testing.

   Pro tip: Tools like SUSA can handle this autonomously — upload your app and get results without writing a single test script.

Of class, Appium drive to be performant, stable, extensile, and a horde of other good qualities. But these three areas of value above should not be neglect. Does this mean Appium is the mobile automation silver heater? Of line not. Like every instrument, Appium has its professional and cons. Appium has decided it & # x27; s of utmost importance to give you a WebDriver interface which enables you to write tests in any language and leverage your Selenium test architecture and knowledge. If you & # x27; re a single-person mobile dev shop who writes only iOS apps, you & # x27; re much better off bind with the creature Apple has provided in the form of Xcode and XCUITest. If you ’ re a large organization whose expertness spans multiple languages, and you hold the goal of trial coverage for your cross-platform mobile app, Appium is locomote to provide the all-around best experience.

It & # x27; s important when putting together your roving mechanization strategy, as when starting any task, to really understand the space your organization is in and the upshot different tool choices will have. The quandary is not between Appium or XCUITest, really (for example with iOS); it ’ s about which kind of interface you want to use to talk to XCUITest. Do you want to write Swift or Objective-C code and get app developer own all the tests? Then XCUITest is probably going to be the best fit for you. In other scenarios, Appium & # x27; s value suggestion is extremely compelling. Not to mention that your Appium test receive the likelihood of outlasting a especial underlying engine, since we maintain a stable interface on top of instrument differences, for exemplar between iOS UIAutomation and XCUITest. Native users of Apple ’ s tools had to completely rewrite their entire test architecture and every individual test when XCUITest was loose. Appium users in most cause alone had to make trivial changes.

There is therefore no want to speak about the decline of Appium and the upgrade of X former tool. Appium & # x27; s scheme is broad plenty to handle any modification in the marketplace of machine-controlled testing tools, subject to the limitations of the ingeniousness of the Appium devs. So far, we & # x27; ve been able to accommodate just about every automation engine, and appear forrad to keeping in step with that vision as the years go on. Appium is besides approximately more than mobile testing - apps are everywhere, not just on our phones. Of course, at any given point, Appium is only as strong as the code contributed by its community. As an open source project, Appium is in a very different category than XCUITest and Espresso, with its own set of pros and gyp to go with that. One of the remarkable benefit of Appium & # x27; s open germ nature is the community of users that has germinate around Appium, and their collective mechanisation wisdom. Our forums are full of one-on-one help and know-how. The real & quot; decline of Appium & quot; would happen if this community evaporated, and our ongoing efforts keep that possibility at bay. On this last note, I invite you as a nomadic essay aficionado to join with us in fixing and brace the world of mobile automation, making it globally accessible to everyone, no matter how quickly the fundamental engines like XCUITest and Espresso come and go. This, in my humble opinion, is the best way to keep peregrine automation from get a zero sum game.

Want to catch up with Jonathan and other Appium Project team leaders? Make sure to join us in London on April 6 for the first-everAppiumConf. Learn morehere or today (optional workshops are also available on April 5).