5 Open Source Test Automation Tools For Mobile Applications

By Author: TomWade
Total Articles: 34
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As mobile applications are now becoming more and more critical to businesses, testing professionals are compelled to adopt new tools and frameworks for effective mobile application testing. Evaluating and ensuring the quality of a mobile application is a complex process and depends on the time and resources available.
There are multiple mobile application test automation tools available online which help in building cases for mobile application testing . One needs to make a choice between open source tools and premium ones depending on requirement and technical skills available.
Let us review some of the top open source test automation tools available for mobile automation testing.
-Appium: It is a test automation tool for automating native, hybrid and mobile web applications on Android and iOS platforms. It allows writing tests across multiple platforms using the same API. It helps to automate any mobile app in any language with complete access to back-end APIs and DBs from test code.
Requirements
Android:
Mac OSX ...
... 10.7+ or Windows 7+ or Linux
Android SDK ≥ 16 (SDK < 16 in Selendroid mode)
iOS:
Mac OSX 10.7+
XCode 4.5+ w/ Command Line Tools
- Selendroid for Android: It is a test automation framework for native, hybrid and mobile web. As it reuses the existing Selenium infrastructure, tests can be written using Selenium 2 client APIs. Selendroid can be used both on emulators and real devices. The four main components of Selendroid are – Web Driver Client, Selendroid Server, Android Driver App, Selendroid Standalone.
Selendroid is able to work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS.
- MonkeyTalk for both Android and iOS: It is a simple tool which helps to automate real, functionally interactive tests for Native, Hybrid, Web/HTML5 and Flex apps. It mainly consists of two basic components:
- MonkeyTalk IDE: It is a tool based on Eclipse that records, plays, edits and maintains the functional test suits for Android and iOS applications running on devices, emulators and simulators.

- MonkeyTalk Agent: These are the libraries for Android and iOS that need to be linked into applications to be tested. These are responsible for enabling applications to record and play the MonkeyTalk Commands.

- Calabash: It is a cross platform test automation framework that supports native apps in iOS and Android. It consists of libraries that enables test scripts to interact with native and hybrid apps programmatically. Calabash also supports cucumber, which helps to express the behavior of an app using non-technical language that can be understood by the QA staff and business experts. Calabash can be used to write automated acceptance and functional tests and helps in test automation from the UI level down.
- Robotium: It is an android test automation framework which can be used to test native and hybrid android applications. It helps to write system, functional and user acceptance test cases which can be executed in an emulator as well as real devices. It can also be easily run through continuous integration tools.
Conclusion
Every testing tool has its own pros and cons each of which need to be evaluated relative to the requirements and type of product. Proper planning, research and practice are required to perform mobile application test automation . Hence, it will be a safe bet to hire a professional Android and iOS application developer who has the skill to use open source tools for mobile application testing.