Top 5 Android Testing Frameworks

Robotium

Undoubted, Robotium was once the most widely used Android testing framework in the early days of Android world. With a similarity with Selenium in Android, it makes testing API simpler.
Robotium is an open source library extending JUnit with plenty of useful methods for Android UI testing. It provides powerful and robust automatic black-box test cases for Android apps (native and hybrid) and web testing. With Robotium you can write function, system and acceptance test scenarios, and test applications where the source code is available.

uiautomator

While Robotium is a good yet basic framework, uiautomator allows you to do more in testing Android apps and games. Google’s test framework allows you to test user interface (UI) of your native Android apps on one or more devices. Another advantage of uiautomator is that it runs JUnit test cases with special privileges, which means test cases can span across different processes. It also provides five different classes for developers to use, including
Similar to its time of birth, it only works on Android devices with API level 16 or higher. Another downside of uiautomator is that it doesn’t support webview, with no way to directly access Android objects. 

Espresso

Espresso is the latest Android test automation framework that got open-sourced by Google, making it available for developers and testers to hammer out their UIs. Espresso has an API that is small, predictable, easy to learn and built on top of the Android instrumentation framework. You can quickly write concise and reliable Android UI tests with it. It is supported on API level 8 (Froyo), 10 (Gingerbread), and 15 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and afterwards.
It’s quite reliable, synchronizing with the UI thread and fast because there is no need for any sleeps (tests run on same millisecond when an app becomes idle). But it does not have support for webviews as well. 

Calabash

Calabash is a cross-platform test automation framework for Android and iOS native and hybrid applications. Calabash’s easy-to-understand syntax enables even non-technical people to create and execute automated acceptance tests for apps on both of these mobile platforms. Calabash’s tests are described in Cucumber and then converted to Robotium or Frank in run time. It supports about 80 different natural language commands (controllers), and new controllers can be implemented in Ruby or Java.

Appium

Appium is a mobile test automation framework (and tool) for native, hybrid and mobile-web apps for iOS and Android. It uses JSONWireProtocol internally to interact with iOS and Android apps usingSelenium’s WebDriver. It supports Android via uiautomator (API level 16 or higher) and Seledroid (API level lower than 16), iOS via UI Automation, and mobile web as Selenium driver for Android and iOS.

One of the biggest advantages of Appium is that you can write your Appium scripts on almost any programming language (e.g. Java, Objective-C, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Python or C#, etc), freedom from having to select tools, compatibility across the most important platforms (Android and iOS), freedom from having to install and configure devices to test and more. Also if you are familiar with Selenium, then it’s easy for you to use Appium in mobile app testing. They use the same WebDriver and DesiredCapabilities is used in the same way. Configuring an application to run on Appium has a lot of similarities to Selenium.

Wrapping up

Certainly, each of them has its pros and cons. Appium is good in testing both your Android and iOS versions at the same time. But if you are a loyal Android developer with only Android-version app, for instance, then using Robotium is not a bad idea too. Relying on Testdroid Recorder will definitely save your lots of time and money (It’s free!) in generating test scripts. Therefore, think about your testing need – functional testing, compatibility testing, UI testing, etc. – and pick up the right and best Android testing framework(s).