Advanced Appium Features for Performance Testing of Mobile Apps

As technology grows, the demand for mobile apps also increases.Mobile applications must be high-performing and compatible with various market-available devices to meet rising customer expectations. To do this, you need to perform high-end mobile app testing.

For mobile app testing, there are many tools and frameworks available in the market. However, Appium is the most used tool for this. Appium is an open-source automation testing tool that allows you to perform mobile app testing. It efficiently checks where the mobile app meets end-user requirements and helps the developers and QA team deliver the best possible and most efficient mobile applications.

Appium has many features for performance testing of mobile apps that help to provide an excellent user experience while maintaining stability and reliability. But with the recent updates of Appium, it became even better.

In this article, you will see what Appium is and what mobile app testing is, and then you will see the advanced Appium features for performance testing of mobile apps.

What is Appium?

Appium is a very popular automation testing tool that was developed by Dan Cuellar and Jason Huggins. Appium is widely used for mobile app testing. It supports many programming languages, such as PHP, Python, Java, etc. The Appium server is written using the Node.js language. It is used to receive requests from the Appium client side.

You can perform Appium automation testing on physical infrastructure as well as on the cloud. Cloud-based Appium mobile testing has many advantages. Using the cloud makes your test more stable. You can scale your test according to use. This allows you to make your testing more efficient.

One of the most widely used cloud-based platforms is LambdaTest. You can leverage the full ability of the Appium framework by seamlessly integrating it with cloud testing platforms like LambdaTest. LambdaTest stands as an AI-driven testing platform that orchestrates and executes tests across a diverse array of environments, including over 3000 configurations, browsers, and real mobile devices.

One important feature of LambdaTest is its effortless scalability in testing operations. Whether it’s conducting manual tests in real time or executing automated tests across multiple environments, LambdaTest provides the essential infrastructure and resources to meet testing requirements at any scale.

LambdaTest facilitates real-time testing, allowing users to interact manually with applications and websites. This functionality proves invaluable for tasks like exploratory testing, debugging, and ensuring consistent user interface behavior across various environments.

Now, let us see what mobile app testing is.

What is Mobile App Testing?

Mobile app testing is defined as the process in which the testing team and QA team perform various types of testing of your software application. Testing the mobile applications is done so that the software application can be used by a huge range of devices available, which are used by millions of users.

Performance testing of mobile app is also used to provide the best user experience to its users. It does so by checking whether all the features of software applications are properly working or not. Using automated mobile app testing is an easy way to make use of automation testing tools like Appium. This allows you to run the tests in parallel, which allows you to re-use the tests, increasing the test reusability, etc. Let us see some of the advanced features of Appium particularly the performance testing of mobile apps.

Now, let us see the various advanced features that are used to perform mobile app testing for better results and to deliver the best possible mobile application.

In-app authentication using Face ID

In-app authentication using Face ID is an advanced feature added to the newer Appium mobile app testing tool. Numerous mobile applications are available that use Face ID to log into the software application and perform their work. So, it is very important for Face ID to work flawlessly in any software application. And Appium does this very efficiently with the new updates. Appium supports testing in-app authentication on iOS simulators but not on real devices.

Apart from this, the Face ID support on the simulators has given three controls, which are as follows:

Coordinate facial features to enhance the security of the software application.
Selecting the face corresponds to checking it during device configuration and enabling the feature entirely.
Matching and unmatching of the face.

Appium is based on the W3C principles and standards. That standard is Web Driver Protocol. Some features of in-app authentication are not defined in the W3C standards. So, Appium provides alternative ways to use these features by using “mobile supporting methods”.

Mobile Supporting Methods

Mobile supporting methods of Appium define its API and expose us to the outer world. One of these methods is “sendBiometricMatch”. There are two arguments of this method which are:

Face ID and its exact value could be true or false to perform a perfect match.
Perform a non-matching face to determine how the application behaves when we do a face mismatch.

Another customizable assistive technology is used for biometric selection.

It supports the “empowered” claim. Sometimes, it may be right, or sometimes, it may be wrong. Apart from this, there is no harm in enabling this multiple times. The test system is intelligent enough to understand. In a valid scenario, it is recommended that you insert it once per test or once in total. Then you can use “Send Biometric Scramble.”

Once activated, you can send real or fake facial recognition verification using a portable support approach called ‘send Biometric mismatch’. In this way, Face ID has proven to be the most practical Appium automation solution because it is easy to access, even for beginners and non-technical professionals.

Streaming Apps on a Browser

The third Appium advanced feature added to the Appium tool is streaming the app on a browser. There are two different APIs for initiating and terminating the video recording. When you begin recording your screen, you can hit a particular port on your program where the particular screen is being shown. Suppose you move from screen one to screen two. What is the significance of this incident?

It uses the “FFmpeg” in the server, and it enables streaming it into the web browser. If you want to use this feature to work with your Appium version, first, you need to install FFmpeg on your machine. Also, do not forget to install it using the correct path so Appium can locate it.

Streaming Across Devices

Appium starts this FFmpeg worker on port 9100 if it is a single device. If you analyze your Appium logs, you will find great information there. Suppose you perform mobile app testing across several devices and systems. You can use the streaming across device feature to do this. All you need to do is to view your screen on the application. Also, you need to provide exceptional and original ports. To meet this requirement, you should use the MJPEG worker URL. There are more than 280 combined capabilities for iOS and Android, which may be viewed in a list.

If you are using simulators or devices to run test cases and want to look at your screen on the web browser, In such cases, you need to provide various ports to use this advanced Appium feature for mobile app testing. Now, let us see the same case for Android. For Android, you need to use third-party streaming applications because there are no direct APIs available.

Appium Event API

Appium Event API is the latest and most advanced feature introduced in the Appium tool for mobile app testing. Appium under the hood uses a WebDriver agent. Many activities occur under the hood when Appium scripts run to perform actions on the mobile application under test. This concept of mobile app testing using Appium is considered one of the most efficient and powerful Appium automation methods.

Numerous events occur when you execute Appium scripts on a tested application. The feature “log timestamp” measures the time it takes to perform that specific activity of testing. Some specific processes need considerable time to execute the testing process. For example, there are two systems: “A” and “B”. It takes 2 seconds and 5 seconds to start the system. In any event, if there are many systems, it is obvious that they will all need different times to start the system. This issue can be fixed using the Event API.

Benefits of Using Events API

Appium Events API is used to address this issue. We’ll be better equipped to understand how long each test system took to start. You may leverage existent events known as “worker occasions” with the Appium Events API. The first case is when an employee can avoid a permanent recovery. The next chance is to start the test system. Appium provides us with a few of these events, of course.

Custom Events

Now, let us focus on custom events. Imagine a case where you want to know how long a software application takes to move from screen A to screen B. You can use the “custom event API” to estimate this time. This custom event can be defined with the vendor and an event name. This helps to enable various differentiations between Appium zone server events, such as simulator start time and our custom events specific to our application.

Conclusion

Appium is an open-source mobile testing app. It has multi-language support which makes it a best choice among the testing community. Using the concept of parallel testing helps to make your testing efficient and deliver faster mobile test runs. Hope you got an idea about Appium and mobile app testing and how you can run parallel tests into Appium for faster results.