Appium Philosophy
For you to understand the origin and philosophy, it is very important to understand its purpose. Initially, Appium was designed to meet mobile automation needs, according to a philosophy outlined by the following four tenets –
- Firstly, you shouldn’t have to recompile your app or modify it in any way in order to automate it.
- Secondly, you shouldn’t be locked into a specific language or framework to write and run your tests.
- Next, a mobile automation framework shouldn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to automation APIs.
- Lastly, a mobile automation framework should be open source, in spirit and practice as well as in name!
In short, Appium is an open-source tool for automating native, mobile web, and hybrid applications on iOS mobile, Android mobile, and Windows desktop platforms.
- First, Native apps are those written using the iOS, Android, or Windows SDKs.
- Second, Mobile web apps are web apps accessed using a mobile browser (Appium supports Safari on iOS and Chrome or the built-in ‘Browser’ app on Android).
- Last, Hybrid apps have a wrapper around a “webview” — a native control that enables interaction with web content.
