Appium is an open source test automation framework for use with native, hybrid and mobile web apps.

Appium aims to automate any mobile app from any language and any test framework, with full access to back-end APIs and DBs from test code. Write tests with your favorite dev tools using all the above programming languages, and probably more (with the Selenium WebDriver API and language-specific client libraries).

A GUI inspector for mobile apps and more, powered by a (separately installed) Appium server. When you're using it to inspect a mobile app, it looks like this:

WebdriverIO is a progressive automation framework built to automate modern web and mobile applications. It simplifies the interaction with your app and provides a set of plugins that help you create a scalable, robust and stable test suite.

It is designed to be:

• Extendable - Adding helper functions, or more complicated sets and combinations of existing commands is simple and really useful
• Compatible - WebdriverIO can be run on the WebDriver Protocol for true cross-browser testing as well as Chrome DevTools Protocol for Chromium based automation using Puppeteer.
• Feature Rich - The huge variety of built-in and community plugins allows you to easily integrate and extend your setup to fulfill your requirements.

You can use WebdriverIO to automate:

• 🌐 modern web applications written in React, Vue, Angular, Svelte or other frontend frameworks
• 📱 hybrid or native mobile applications running in an emulator/simulator or on a real device
• 💻 native desktop applications (e.g. written with Electron.js)

In the following video you are going to learn how to setup Appium + WDIO to automate your very first test script for an Android Application using a simulator.

In the following video you are going to learn how to setup Appium + WDIO to automate your very first test script for an IOS Application using a simulator.

Hope you find this article useful!

Joan.