Appium Room for Improvement

Siddartha Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Deloitte India (Offices of the US)

Image recognition could be improved. We have some images in our mobile applications. It should be able to run from the cloud, so we can automate the catcher. 

We need to launch the Appium server when we want to connect the mobile application with Appium. Sometimes, the Appium server won't connect with the mobile application because of some socket issues, so network connectivity between applications and the Appium server could be improved.

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Abhishek-Tiwari - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Associate at PwC

The challenging part with Appium is that installation can be a bit tricky. It can be  challenging to set up in Android versus iOS environments.

Appium has some limitations in terms of writing code using simulators and online cloud devices. I faced challenges with native based scenarios, battery turn out percentage, battery charging percentage, and memory capacity.

The other challenge I faced involved codes changing from device to device. For example, the piece of code that works in iOS version 10.1 won't work in iOS version 6.0.

In upcoming releases, if they can reduce some more of the dependencies like SDK, UIAutomator, etc., it would be great. That is, I'd like to see a consolidated package or bundle release that is much more user-friendly.

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AshishSingh11 - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation Test Lead at Cap Gemini

The solution's integration with the cloud-based setup needs improvement. Also, they should work on making the link text easily clickable.

They should add an in-built framework. In addition, they should work on automatically updating the new versions for Android. Presently, we have to implement the pop-up updates manually. Due to the pipeline setup, the same updates fail to adapt to different mobile versions. They should also add a feature to automatically recognize the change of the locators and update the solution. It will save us a lot of time.

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Appium
April 2024
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RS
Test Engineer at Deloitte

Appium could improve by enabling record and run techniques similar to what they have in other licensing tools, such as Micro Focus. We have to all write the code, and then we can proceed.

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RajeevSAwant - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Automation CoE at Truglobal

There are Android and IOS, two key platforms. There are some other dependencies that typically are taken care of by some of the commercial tools like Xperitus. These kinds of tools take care of these other aspects. 

One thing which can be really helpful is that there is some kind of a recorder made available rather than scripting everything. There needs to be some kind of recorder or some kind of platform which is made available. That would add immense value. It's already very popular, however, that will help a lot to experience the overall automation development.

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VT
Senior Test Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution needs to support more actions such as locking a phone or adding a fingerprint. 

Some action methods have been combined to one touch action but this should revert back for easier customization. 

The user interface needs improvement because there are issues when setting up environment variables. 

Some actions are not supported across languages such as JavaScript, Python, and C# so documentation, examples, and boilerplates are needed. 

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Alona Tupchei - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineering manager I - Quality at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We previously worked with native applications, and there weren't any good mobile app testing tools. We started working with React Native, which works well with Appium, but it would be good to see better integration; the way elements are displayed can be messy. React Native is very popular nowadays, so it's essential to have that compatibility.

Appium doesn't recognize IDs placed by our developers on nested elements when we use React Native for iOS; it just sees the whole page and one element. We use coordinates to get around this, but it isn't the best system, and nobody in the community has been able to help us.

iOS is also strict in general when it comes to signatures and developer accounts, which creates additional headaches for iOS testing compared to Android. It would be great to see a more streamlined setup for iOS, but that might be more of an Apple issue than an Appium one. 

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Venkat Vakiti - PeerSpot reviewer
Mobile Apps and Web Development Technical Lead at Unfoldlabs

There is always a concern about the amount of code that is required to enhance the automation process. The idea of having less code or no code is what we would like to see in future updates. Increase performance, battery, load testing, and no-code less, more advanced topics which we can bring to the tool features. If we can make it lightweight and clear to understand and in an easy way, that will make this tool even more worthwhile.

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Muzammil Riaz - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Test Engineer at a outsourcing company with 201-500 employees

The solution can be improved by granting more flexibility around integration with app activity ID, which is sometimes not easily available for automation engineers to configure.

There is room for improvement with the scalability of the Appium server interaction.

I would like a feature to allow for iOS automation without having to use Apple Xcode.

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Prakash-G - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Automation Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Support-wise, it could be better. Whenever we get some issues, it may take some time. I'd like them to be more responsive. 

There's not too much public documentation or information. If we Google information or something else regarding the Appium, there won't be much compared to Selenium. Selenium is also open-source. Appium details are limited.

It is difficult to understand. Recently, there were major changes in Appium. Understanding those changes, was a bit difficult. There just wasn't enough transparency.

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Andrii N. - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior QA Test Automation Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I'm facing a lot of issues with my new juniors when they set up Appium for iOS. For Android, it's easy, however, for iOS to interact with it on iPhones or something. It requires some additional libraries and some additional installation. Sometimes it's not working. While Android works well, iOS continues to be an issue. 

There are a lot of issues on GitHub discussions and Stack Overflow, et cetera, and it's still not resolved. When we use Appium Inspector and just Appium, we are not able to inspect nest elements. Half of the elements are nested. Especially for React Native, it's not visible in Inspector, and we cannot interact with this element. We need some bug fixes for nested elements. 

We'd like a one-button click where you hit it, and everything is automatically installed. 

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EK
Software Engineer Lead-Engineering Productivity at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I rarely use Appium nowadays because I'm now at the managerial level, but the last time I used it, whenever I selected and clicked on an element, Appium was very slow. I tried to debug it, but I still couldn't find the problem, so this is an area for improvement in the solution.

Another area for improvement lies with the connector and server. For example, the effort to get into the local machine sometimes causes the emulator to become slow, which then leads to failure in testing, and this is the usual issue I've encountered from Appium.

An additional feature I'd like added to Appium in its next release is being able to do automation in iOS without using XPath and the name of the element. In Xcode, you can use previous UI tests for detecting elements, but in Appium, you have to use Xpath and the element name instead of being able to directly put the X-UiPath, which is what you can do in Xcode. In iOS as well, sometimes the element doesn't have a name or a path. Sometimes, there's also no element.

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OC
Sr Data Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

What needs improvement in Appium is its documentation. It needs to give more context on the libraries that Appium is using under the hood. For example, my team is using Appium for Android automation, and a lot of times, I feel that there's functionality that's available through the Appium interface, that exists within the UIAutomator, but there aren't a lot of useful or helpful resources on the internet to find that information, so it would be good to have some linkage with the underlying platform itself.

Another room for improvement in Appium is that it's buggy sometimes. For example, at times, there's a bug in the inspector application that doesn't allow me to save my desired capability set, so it would be nice to get that bug fixed, but overall, Appium is a good tool.

The Touch Actions functionality in Appium also needs improvement. For example, if I want to initiate a scroll on the device that I'm running Appium on, sometimes Swipe works, but in other situations, I have to explicitly use action chains, so I'm not too sure what's the better approach.

What I'd like to see in the next version of Appium is a more intelligent and more intuitive AppiumLibrary, in terms of identifying menus and scroll bars, etc., because right now, I'm unsure if I have to do a lot of export reversals to get to the elements I'm looking for. It would be nice to have some functionality built in, which would allow me to easily get those exports.

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Nandini Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineer at Innominds

Appium can improve when the case fails, there should be a feature where you can generate the report from Appium. Once you're on a test case, automatically the screenshot should be captured which would avoid manual intervention. These features would be beneficial to migrate to Appium.

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Mubarak Arimiyah - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Quality Assurance Engineer at Netow Solutions Ltd

The tool needs to add a dependency manager. 

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ZM
Head of Solutions Delivery (Systems) at a wellness & fitness company with 51-200 employees

We haven't been able to fully leverage Appium for multiple reasons. I think number one is just that the tests take a long time to run. We have had some issues around just the results themselves and how predictable they are, but those are not issues with Appium directly. It's helped us to uncover issues that we otherwise wouldn't have known about.

The challenge we have with Appium is we're currently writing the tests in Java, and it does make it difficult because now you need to find automation testers with a Java skillset. That's why we were looking at other tools like Eggplant that would allow us to automate mobile testing through easier mechanisms, like being able to record a manual test and automatically generate the test script for it. We're looking at faster automation and making automation more accessible to their technical people.

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it_user371355 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director, Software Development and Testing at Softcrylic

They can improve test reporting, and more importantly on test scripts, by providing less constructs to automate more complex testing scenarios.

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JH
Principal Consultant at Plateer

I can’t think of an area that needs improvement currently.

The setup and installation were a problem for us at first.

Tests can take a long time.

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JK
Automation and Nft Manager at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Stability is an area that needs some improvement. During execution, the Appium Studio experiences some intermittent disconnection.

There are some paid solutions available on the market that have AI included with self healing, which means with changes in application script would detect automatically. The software is smart enough to show you unexpected changes. It can show you the options to change certain element locator which has changed with recent build.

Maybe this additional feature can be added as a paid feature in future.

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it_user377433 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

It needs to accommodate applications that use React.js and AngularJS.

Also, an application developed on the Unity platform, such as a gaming application, objects are moving in that case. Interacting with those elements is still lacking in Appium. Appium doesn't have the internal library to play with the Unity platform. That is a huge lack right now.

In addition, on Google platforms we can't use Appium to automate, that is a lack. 

So what I'm suggesting is that Appium should develop a newer, generic solution for all kinds of platforms used to develop applications.

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VM
Architect - Automation at DMI (Digital Management, Inc.)

This product is still maturing, so at times there are issues with its stability if your scripts run continuously for more than fifteen to twenty hours. At times, we have witnessed the Appium server stop responding for forty to forty-five minutes. As a result, scripts do not move in this time period. Sometimes the connection resets due to USB or Network issues, which is not an Appium issue.

There is no user interface because it is a complete development solution, and you have to code in Java. I do not see any room to include an interface in the near future, as is the case with other commercial automation tools.

For iOS automation, it is very tedious to install or configure this particular library in your system, and it becomes very difficult to troubleshoot if you are not Mac and Xcode savvy. You require an understanding of the configuration of Xcode projects and you have to troubleshoot a lot of things at times. 

Configuration/Installation-wise, there is a lot of room for improvement in this solution, especially for the iOS platform.

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MD
Staff Engineer - Product and Platform Engineering at Altimetrik (Deployed at FORD)

Appium has problems with automated validations following iOS updates, causing us to have to validate manually. Its execution speed is also very slow.

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it_user717255 - PeerSpot reviewer
QA Lead at a tech vendor

Usability. The documentation is not always easy to follow, especially the advanced setup part, where the IOS predicates usage. Also, the Appium inspector, a tool which allows you to inspect screen elements, is rather tricky to setup.

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DT
Quality and Testing Services Leader at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

When doing mobile testing Appium is difficult as you can't use it for mobile testing in virtual machines. You need to have a physical machine. If Appium could manage this problem, and if it had more facility for configuration it would be a spectacular solution.

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DV
Test Automation Lead/Consultant at Aspire Systems

It should provide reliable & promising executions every time without any interruptions and avoiding any synchronization issues. They should also think of supporting Windows mobile applications as well in future.

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Buyer's Guide
Appium
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Appium. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.