Testing mobile web applications on Android using Appium

Appium drives the automation of Android applications using a UI Automator bundled with Andorid SDK. The process is pretty much the same as testing on iOS.

Appium works as an HTTP server and receives the commands from test scripts over the JSON wire protocol. Appium sends these commands to the UI Automator so that these can be executed on the app launched in an emulator or real device. While doing so, Appium translates the JSON commands into UI Automator Java commands that are understood by Android SDK. This process is shown in the following diagram:

When a command is executed on the app in the emulator or device, the target app sends the response back to the UI Automator, which is sent back to the Appium. It translates the UI Automator responses into Selenium WebDriver JSON wire protocol responses, and sends them back to the test script.

Getting Ready

Testing apps on Android is similar to testing on iOS. For Android, we will use a real...