Quick Comparison between Appium Vs XCUITest

I have spent a fair number of years in the past with mobile automation tools like SeeTest, Selendroid, Appium and XCUITest.

With hands on experience in 4+ different languages on automation over the years, I might be in a place to comment the following in this article

There seems to be a huge mindset gap in our industry where many times professionals think Appium is any day more advantageous over other platform based test tools, just because appium has “one code runs in all” policy, which sounds like a real cool idea, which however fails to work smoothly and reliably on real time projects which are dependent on large run time test data.

• Must for mobile application testing
• Gives confidence during frequent mobile app releases
• Reduces Time to market
• Reduces human errors during manual testing

Automating on mobile is tricky & challenging

• Platform diversities: Android vs iOS
• Types of mobile apps: Native vs Hybrid vs Mobile-web

XCUITest

• Apple’s native UI Testing framework in Xcode
• Supports Swift as well as Objective-C
• Tests the UI layer
• Interacts with the app the way a user does
• Covers broader aspects of functionality
• Better at testing integration of larger pieces
• Compliments Unit Testing

Pros & Cons of XCUITest

Pros:

• Fast, Easy to maintain
• Mature & Reliable: No more flaky tests
• Apple’s native language support
• Easy CI Integration
• Xcode Test Recorder
• Faster than ‘On-Top-of-It’ Frameworks
• No Additional Components Required
• tvOS support

Cons:

• No Cross-Platform Support
• Limited Programming Language Support

XCUITest APIs

• XCUIApplication — A proxy for an application under test that can be launched and terminated.
• XCUIElement — A UI element in an application.
• XCUIElementQuery — A query for locating UI elements.