How To Automate Your App Using Selenium Testing?

The Selenium automated testing tool has become extremely popular for desktop and web applications in recent years. But it is significant to note that mobile testing has become an increasingly important requirement as well. Why has the mobile testing requirement grown so much? There are several reasons for this growth in mobile testing. Just take a moment to consider how reliant each of us has become on our mobile phones. We cannot live without our mobile phones even for a few hours.

In this blog post, we will have a look at how you can test your mobile applications using Selenium testing.

Have you ever wondered that what makes a mobile phone so valuable?

A lot of organizations design and develop mobile apps, but they do not invest in a qualitative QA team to ensure quality. This makes them free and there are several reasons for that. Almost every task you want to accomplish can be done with a mobile app. Almost any task can be fulfilled with a mobile application that is already available.

Below are a few statistics that give you an idea of how high the development of mobile applications is at the moment.

• Over $935 billion in revenue is expected to be generated by mobile applications by 2023
• Millennials open apps 50+ times per day, according to 21% of them.
• Apps are available for download from the Apple App Store in the amount of 1.96 million
• Through the Google Play Store, you can download as many as 2.87 million apps

In an environment where mobile applications are so popular and widely used, there is a lot of competition. This means that quality is a key factor in an app’s success. This is why mobile application testing will become increasingly important. Moreover, automation of mobile testing will become increasingly vital for well-established applications. 

In order to automate mobile application testing, we need a tool. Selenium is widely used for automating web applications. Can we use the same Selenium for automating mobile applications? Let’s find out.

Firstly, let us have a basic understanding of Selenium.

Rather than automating desktop applications, Selenium automates web applications across different browsers and platforms. It is comparable to HP QuickTest Pro (formerly UFT).

Selenium testing refers to checking a web application with Selenium, not a desktop or mobile application. Selenium only works with web applications.

Features of Selenium

What is the most favored reason why Selenium is so popular when it comes to testing web apps? It is definitely not the price. Selenium infact has many other reasons. But, can Selenium be used for testing mobile apps? To demonstrate why selenium 4 is the preferred one, let’s look at its latest features.

In addition to the fact that it supports all major browsers natively, it also offers insanely high rates of efficiency. Web drivers are designed to be simple, especially their programming interface.

The only thing you need to do is choose the right library for your chosen programming language.

• IDEs like Selenium provide debugging features like breakpoints and exception pausing
• Installing an extension to the browser makes using the IDE selenium very easy.
• Since Selenium IDE includes commands such as if, while, times, etc., it has a heavy control flow structure
• In addition to Chrome/Chromium, Selenium supports Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers, as well as Chrome/Chromium.
• With Selenium IDE, multiple locators can be recorded depending on which element it interacts with.
• If you must test an application on different browsers and operating systems, Selenium Grid will come in handy

Selenium for Mobile Browser Automation 

In order to test web applications in mobile browsers, Selenium can be used with the Appium framework. Selenium is a popular automation suite for testing desktop web applications, and Appium is the best for automating mobile applications. As part of Selenium 3, JSON Wire protocol is used to exchange data with clients, and W3C (World Wide Consortium) protocol is used with the client to encode and decode APIs.

• All popular browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer, are W3C-compliant. The WebDriver APIs are implemented following the W3C guidelines. 
• Because Selenium 4 uses W3C, all browsers supporting W3C will run automation tests consistently. 
• There are many languages supported by Selenium, including Java, C#, Python, and Ruby. 
• Due to the elimination of JSON Wire Protocol, Selenium 4 allows tests to communicate directly with web browsers.

A client-server architecture server written in Node.js, Appium automates native, mobile web, and hybrid apps on iOS, Android, and Windows. As a result of the client-server architecture, clients connect to the server in order to get benefit from the services available on the server. Any communication between the client and the server takes the form of responses and requests. 

Likewise, Appium supports Java, Objective-C, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Python, and C#, as well as multiple languages such as Selenium.

Can You Use Selenium For Mobile Testing?

Selenium is not directly used for automated mobile application testing. We can, however, use Selenium frameworks to automate mobile application testing. The following Selenium frameworks are supported for automating mobile testing:

1. Selendroid

2. Appium

• Selendroid:

Selendroid is a Selenium framework that can be used for testing native and hybrid Android applications’ user interfaces in line with its name. The Selendroid framework can also be used in the Selenium Grid, when it is integrated with real devices. Although it can be used for emulators, it can also be used in Selenium Grid. Selendroid allows you to simultaneously communicate with multiple Android devices, allowing you to perform parallel testing and scaling.

• Selenium Appium: 

Appium is an automated, open source testing framework for native, hybrid and mobile web applications that can be used to test their user interfaces. There are many languages that it is compatible with, including Node.JS, PHP, Java, Objective-C, JavaScript, Clojure, C#, Python and Perl, and is a cross-platform tool as well. Testing on Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, or iOS platforms is easy with Selenium Appium when you use a single script to run tests on all platforms simultaneously.

How Can You Automate Mobile Application Testing Using Selenium?

Appium and Selendroid support Selenium directly, which means that automated test scripts cannot be written directly using Selenium for mobile application testing. Below are the steps for using Appium and Selendroid for testing:

• Development of the test script

This step involves writing the automated test scripts in programming languages. If you already know Selenium, you will not need to learn any new skills to write the test scripts. Nevertheless, we all know how time-consuming it is to write automated test scripts ourselves, and it takes a longer time to get ROI.

• Test Management

Appium and Selendroid are both open-source automation tools, so their test management is not too impressive because of this. Selendroid records every element clicked and stores the locator and the command. The same type of recorder is available in Appium but only for iOS mobile applications. Because of this, we receive test locators and commands only, and we are not provided with test scripts. We must use our own third-party test management tool if we are using either of these two frameworks. 

• Backward Compatibility

Today, Appium is integrated with Selendroid to provide backward compatibility with Android devices running Android 4.0 and above.

The original Selendroid framework was more effective, so we should use Selendroid to provide backward compatibility for Android devices with lower API versions (API 10-17).

• Gestures Testing

It is imperative that Appium and Selendroid recognize hand gestures efficiently since mobile applications operate by using hand gestures. It is good to know that both of them do so using dedicated APIs. In this case, Selendroid wins because it offers ‘Advanced User Interactions API’ that can also be used for complex gestures.

Conclusion

Our understanding is now that Appium and Selendroid each provide their own advantages and uses, depending on the specific needs of the project. Appium can be used to automate Android and iOS application functional, regression, compatibility, and integration testing.

When testing Android 10-17, it is best to use Selendroid since it is backward compatible. Also, Appium provides better community support if we need it. The features of Selenium can be leveraged by both Selendroid and Appium, but many prefer Appium because of its flexibility and agility. Appium is also highly supported by its community. I hope you now know a little bit more about automating mobile apps.

However, a development project involves millions of dollars. This is a situation in which you can’t experiment. Not only is it risky, but maintaining an automation suite can be costly and time-consuming if it’s done by people who don’t know what they’re doing. Using automation in application testing is only possible if skilled testers are involved. If any mistakes are made, the automation framework will become a burden instead of providing any value. Automating your existing development process can help you avoid any mishaps.

The LambdaTest Selenium Automation testing Grid allows you to automate Selenium tests across multiple browsers and operating systems in a secure, reliable, and scalable manner. By automating cross-browser testing with Selenium scripts, you get higher test coverage and shorter build times on 3000+ browsers and operating systems.

You can use LambdaTest to evaluate how well your web application renders across multiple browsers when accessed. Your locally hosted web pages can be automated cross-browser tested using LambdaTest Tunnel. The following post will assist you in deploying your Selenium automation test scripts on LambdaTest Selenium automation grid quickly. You can also run a single test across multiple browser/OS configurations simultaneously.