5 Top Reasons you should use Appium for your next Mobile Test Automation Project

5 Top Reasons you should use Appium for your next Mobile Test Automation Project
Programming & Automation

Appium is an open-source test automation framework for use with native, hybrid and mobile web apps. It drives iOS, Android, and Windows apps using the WebDriver protocol.

Appium has been developed by Dan Cuellar and backed up by Jason Huggins, co-creator of Selenium and the company SauceLabs.

Here are five reasons to use Appium:

Free & Open Source

Appium is free and open-source, meaning you don't need to spend countless amounts of money on licenses and support. Moreover, you can at any time, you want to add a feature, you can fork or clone a version and modify it to meet your requirements.

Cross-Platform

Nowadays, most mobile applications are developed for several platforms rather than sticking to one. As the app will be mostly the same, you can in the same project, write tests for both Android and iOS.

You don't need yet budget another team dedicated to working solely on a particular platform.

Mature Project with online Documentation & Active Community

Appium is not a new project. It's been around since 2011 and became open source around 2014. So with almost a decade in existence - including the early versions, you have plenty of documentation readily available online. And an active community always willing to help.

Here are two sites I'm always using:

  1. Appium Pro
  2. Appium Discuss

Relatively Easy Learning Curve

Appium is based on the WebDriver Protocol similar to Selenium. So if you know the latter, learning and using Appium will be easy and straightforward. You can then use it with popular test runners such as TestNG, xUnit etc...

Language Agnostic

With this Testing Framework, you are pampered with the number of programming languages you can use.

Enterprises usually prefer strong typed languages such as C# and Java for their stability, while if you want to use dynamic ones like Python or Ruby, you can do so.


If you want to become an expert in Appium, here's a bestselling course: