Appium or Xamarin UI test - experiences and drawbacks

user_3139811 0
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Not sure if this is the right place to ask this kind of questions because it is also a bit personal favor but what are your experiences with Xamarin UITest and/or Appium. Until now I only had experience with Appium but for our new project we maybe want to use Xamarin UITest.

xamarin.uitest appium automated-tests
3 Answers

Wrong answer, with Xamari UI Test framewor you can automate Progressive Mobile Apps, Hybrid apps a Native Apps, on Android and IOS Some samples here: [https://www.zuehlke.com/blog/en/mobile-ui-testing/][1]

user_67315910

We have a React Native app that we are currently testing with Xamarin UI Test, and I've spent quite a while comparing these test frameworks. It looks like our team is going to switch to Appium now. Here is what I like about Appium:

  • Much better documentation, more resources online

  • More features (which allows you to automate more stuff)

  • Runs slightly faster on Android (30% faster maybe), not seeing almost any difference with iOS

  • Bigger, more active community, less chance of framework becoming deprecated

  • Based on our experience it's more reliable. With Xamarin we kept getting "device port 27753 in use" or smth like that which we couldn't resolve.

  • More "device farm" options to run tests on. This is very important for us. With Xamarin the only options I've found are BitBar (flakey, adds about 5 minutes overhead to test runs) and Xamarin Test Cloud (expensive). With Appium there are more options (SauceLabs seems to be working great, we are only starting to use it though)

  • Allows you to choose from a lot of programming languages (our team is most comfortable with TypeScript)

  • Client-server architecture which allows test code to run on-premises (might not be a benefit to many teams, but it is to us), so the test code is able to access our internal APIs thanks to this

user_13285130

Firstly, SO is usually not the right place for such questions as such questions usually get closed as off-topic and primarily opinion based. Luckily, xamarin.uitest is a very unpopular tag, hence, your question survived :)

For what Xamarin.UITest does, its actually not bad. The biggest issue to consider is that Xamarin.UITest requires your app to be written using Xamarin.Forms and for me, personally, this is the biggest drawback.

Other issues, that I've encountered:

  • Scrolling is terribly slow
  • Limited API (Only basic UI properties can be evaluated, see here)
  • Minimal differences betqeen Android and iOS which can become really annoying, depending on your use case

Other than that, Xamarin.UITest is a pretty solid UI-testframework and if your app is written using Xamarin.Forms, I would recommend you to use Xamarin.UITest.

user_57366330
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