Appium – pros and cons

Appium is an open source tool for automating mobile apps, such as native, web-based, and hybrid applications designed for the Android, iOS, and Firefox OS platforms.

Before diving into Appium's advantages, let's discuss its shortcomings, as follows:

• No direct support for Android Alert Handling: Alert handling is not implemented yet for native apps via Alert API but, we have an alternative to handle it which we will see in Chapter 7, Advanced User Interactions. Hopefully, alert handling will be implemented soon.

• Limited support for Android versions: Appium directly supports Android Version 17 or later, but if we want to work with versions older than version 17, then we can use the integrated tool Selendroid.

• Lack of image recognition: We can't locate images; to work with images, we have to work with screen coordinates, which is not the best way but again it's in their road map to apply the locator strategy to find images.

• Mobile gestures support: Some of the gesture...