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Making Android UI testing enjoyable

Rafa Vázquez on October 26, 2020

UI testing in Android has always been controversial for many reasons. Tests are slow because they must run in emulators or real devices. They can b...

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Liviu Lupei • Oct 26 '20

Nice article.

You should also try Endtest for building and executing automated tests for Mobile Apps.

It uses an Appium engine and it even has a test recorder.
These chapters are a good starting point:
• How to create Mobile Tests
• Finding elements in Mobile Applications
• How to execute Mobile Tests

I actually work there, so feel free to ask me anything about it.

liweijian • May 18 '21

If Endtest is using Appium, I believe that's another topic. According to the official doc

Appium's flagship support for automating Android apps is via the UiAutomator2 driver

Espresso is much more fast, and have lots of other advantages like very good at test RecyclerView.

Liviu Lupei • May 18 '21

Do you have any studies or data to support your claim that Espresso is faster than UiAutomator2?
I'm curious to learn more about that.

liweijian • May 19 '21 • Edited

From google official training course

Espresso tests run optimally fast! It lets you leave your waits, syncs, sleeps, and polls behind while it manipulates and asserts on the application UI when it is at rest.

From 3rd introduction

In my opinion, the first trait is Espresso faster than Ui Automator.

Liviu Lupei • May 19 '21

Espresso was built by Google.
Your first source is literally from Google.
And your second source is an article published on Medium by someone.

None of those articles contain any comparison data.

I was hoping for something more reliable, that would include data, measurements, comparisons, etc.

anticafe • Nov 6 '20

I also see Kakao and Kaspresso as a good library to support write UI test. How does it compare to Barista?

Rafa Vázquez • Nov 6 '20

I haven't personally used Kakao or Kaspresso, so take my response with a grain of salt. But from what I've seen about them, they seem more opinionated than Barista on how to write your tests. They are very linked to the concept of page object with a custom DSL, which can be helpful for some projects for sure.

Barista is more "low level", closer to Espresso but with a simpler API and some hidden "magic" as described above. You decide how to structure your own tests. In this post, I showed how we do our PageObjects, but you're free to use any other approach.

In my personal and debatable opinion, our PageObjects are more semantic, because we write them from the perspective of what the user would be doing. However, the DSL from Kakao exposes some information about the structure of the screen (button this, recyclerview that). I'm not saying that's wrong, it's just different.

I hope I could shed some light on your question :)