We performed a comparison between Appium and IBM MobileFirst based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about OutSystems, Mendix, Salesforce and others in Mobile Development Platforms."The solution is easy to use."
"It's an open-source solution with a very large community and available documentation."
"The library is extensive so the driver interacts with most functions or actions on mobile devices."
"The most valuable feature is that it's easy to launch applications. Appium has everything that Selenium has. So many good tools support Appium. We can take some Excel sheets and use them to fill out the text box that's in there. We can also take screenshots of failures."
"We develop apps using the React Native framework, and Appium integrates well for testing those apps. The Appium automation framework also has good integration with GitHub Actions and plenty of other tools and frameworks, including BrowserStack."
"The solution is stable."
"The way Appium server interacts with mobile apps is fantastic. It provides all the information about the elements inside the app, Android as well as iOS. I can interact with the element quickly, just type some text or get some text values from the element - whether it's a drop-down, or web text, or a native element."
"The most valuable features of Appium are the in-built functionality, which we can use in our code. For example, move back, move front, navigate one page before, and navigate one page ahead. You can do this by using the in-built functions from Appium."
"I like Its capability for developing hybrid applications, with an ability to integrate device-native code as well"
"With help of this product, we have been able to develop mobile applications without having complete knowledge of each mobile OS's native programming technology. App development, delivery, and code management have been very efficient using this product."
"IBM MobileFirst has one of the most feature-rich admin panels."
"We need some bug fixes for nested elements."
"They should add an in-built framework."
"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."
"Stability is an area that needs some improvement."
"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."
"One thing which can be really helpful is that there is some kind of a recorder made available rather than scripting everything."
"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."
"It needs to accommodate applications that use React.js and AngularJS."
"I would like to see improved support for native device functions."
"There are issues with push notifications, especially for Windows mobile apps. JSONStore also crashes abruptly at times."
Earn 20 points
Appium is ranked 7th in Mobile Development Platforms with 25 reviews while IBM MobileFirst is ranked 14th in Mobile Development Platforms. Appium is rated 8.0, while IBM MobileFirst is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Appium writes "It's easy to launch applications". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM MobileFirst writes "It provides access management for the enterprise user as well as for the consumer". Appium is most compared with Tricentis Tosca, Katalon Studio, Perfecto, Xamarin Platform and Apache JMeter, whereas IBM MobileFirst is most compared with IBM MaaS360, Ionic, Microsoft Azure App Service and SAP Mobile Platform.
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