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I'm trying to push my organisation into more modern ways of testing our mobile software, thus I'm trying to build a list of tools that I can use to present to my line manager and his bosses. By testing I mean either allow for automated testing or just to keep tracking of unit and functionality testing.

The platform that need to be supported are:

  • iOS
  • Android
  • Windows Mobile
  • Windows Phone

Support for Blackberry and others is optional.

I am not looking for tools that only allow for web apps testing, only native apps.

I know of

It seems that there are a lot of tools available for web apps but not that many for native apps.

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6 Answers 6

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The platform that need to be supported are:

  • iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone

— For your needs you can use SeeTest, EggPlant, Ranorex, Borland Silk Mobile — but they all are commercial solutions, most have free trial.

SeeTest is quite popular at the moment and has very positive feedback. Another good one is EggPlant as I know.

From free solutions you can look at Sikuli — however almost for sure you'll need additional configuration if you need to test on real devices.

Just for information:

Multi-platform tools, that will work for native apps, include:

All this tools are open-source and are free to use.
However I can't name good Windows Phone testing tools at the moment.

Appium is a good choice if you're familiar with Selenium
(it uses WebDriver API and supports many languages, including Java, C#, Ruby, Python, PHP, etc.).

Calabash is a good one as well, but it supports only Ruby. Also it has Cucumber support out of box.

I have no experience with MonkeyTalk. I know it has its own language and requires source code to test mobile apps.

Also there are screenshot-based tools, they will work for mobile as well. For instance:

fMBT and Sikuli are free; SeeTest, EggPlant and Ranorex should be paid for.

Their work is based on image recognition. So locators are graphical images. Assertions can be made by comparison with pre-made images, and also the usually can OCR text.

But when using screenshot-based tools, there can be some issues related to running tests on physical devices and to running tests in parallel.

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  • Particularly for questions like this, which may not have a single correct answer, more information is better than less.
    – Kate Paulk
    Commented Jun 5, 2014 at 10:15
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The answer depends on type of tools you would like to use. If you are familiar with agile software development and want your developers to implement and maintain test automation on UI level that you can consider to use developers focused tools

Android:

iOS:

  • UI Automation(from Apple) it has a lot of JS extensions like tune_js
  • Frank(built on top of UI Automation)
  • Calabash

There are a lot of free tools available for both Android and iOS but that I specified worked well on my past.

I did not use things like Ranorex or Borland because open-sourced tools was enough to solve my tasks.

P.S. Sorry I cannot post more that two links due to SE limitation

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  • Thanks for the reply! Although your answer is good it does not cover multi-platform tools, only tools that work with a single platform.
    – Nuno Curado
    Commented May 9, 2013 at 10:21
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    I'm not a fan of heavy test automation tools because just small group of people supposed to use it. Due to license costs. I want developers to maintain those tests in the same language they write application. All other practices is coming from this statement.
    – Andrii Dzynia
    Commented May 10, 2013 at 16:30
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For iOS and Android you can use Appium.

And for Windows Phone you can use Winium.

Both tools are "selenium-based", meaning that they have same basic API, and you can use same language and tools to write tests for all three platforms.

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Silkmobile and SeeTest are actually the same tools but from different vendors. Silkmobile currently is good tool (a lot of bugs was fixed), it supports popular languages like java, python, etc. Also it supports specific actions like swipes, drags, hide keyboard, install/uninstall of app. It works on different platforms: IOS, Android, Windows phone, others. Price is high but functionality is good. For Android I can recommend Robotium.

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To test the Native and Hybrid Apps, Appium and Calabash are the best options. You can test your app on both platforms i.e. Android and iOS using any of the above tool.

Appium can be used if you are already familiar with selenium and free to use multiple supported languages for scripting.

Calabash is mainly used with ruby language and have its own calabash commands to perform the gestures with the app.

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Users who read reviews for Ranorex compared it to HPE LeanFT. You can see user reviews for this and other alternatives here (note: you need to register to read more than one review.) https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/comparisons/hpe-leanft_vs_ranorex

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