Android App api testing with mock

Question

Currently, I ran into a situation where we are having constant Backend/API issues and because of the same, I can't continue with the testing. I was wondering if it is somehow possible to use a server or a proxy which gets the API request and I can send it as a response. (Basically I wanna manually send a response to see if the app behaves as it is supposed to)

So we will create a "new" app that is just running against my local machine and I can send the responses that I'm not able to test. I would rather test some of these cases myself. I wonder if it even possible.

Or should this be left for the developer to handle.

Any insight and ideas would be helpful.

Answer 1

It should be realtively easy to setup a server that behaves as your API, but always returns the same values so you can test against it.

You just need to make sure you can redirect the traffic from your mobile app to this server. Simplest way is to make it configurable in the app itself. Alternately you can point the production hostname to your test server.

• Change Android host file: http://www.howtogeek.com/140576/how-to-edit-the-hosts-file-on-android-and-block-web-sites/

For a JSON/REST api server have a look at:

• JSON-server: https://www.npmjs.com/package/json-server
• Howto: http://www.betterpixels.co.uk/projects/2015/05/09/mock-up-your-rest-api-with-json-server/

Answer 2

We used NodeJS to help as out of a similar situation. We designed a mock server on NodeJS and configured REST API to hit Node sever and fetch responses.