Aplitools Visual Tests with Genymotion SaaS

2024-04-23

Visual testing for mobile QA

As more and more mobile QA teams are getting rid of manual testing, the need for automated testing is growing. Most teams focus their test automation on Unit, API, Integration, and Functional UI. An important aspect of your mobile automation testing is Visual testing.

Visual UI Testing is critical to catching unintended visual bugs while updating UI components. Visual bugs are difficult to find using functional tests. Functional tests focus on identifying bugs in your workflow. If you haven’t tried visual testing before, you’ll be surprised how many visual bugs you may find with an automated visual testing tool like Applitools. Manually finding visual bugs is painfully difficult because it requires comparing hundreds of images of your mobile app.

Applitools for visual regression testing

Applitools allows cross-platform testing to identify visual bugs.

Applitools focuses on the visual aspects of your app. Applitools plays a major role in exposing the visual differences between baseline snapshots and both current and future snapshots. Applitools AI powered end-to-end visual testing and monitoring solution helps developers, test automation engineers, QA professionals, and DevOps teams automatically run visual tests at scale. Applitools runs visual tests at scale across every app, browser, OS, and screen size.

UI verification behavior

Applitools allows developers to verify that each UI element in each page appears in the right color, shape, position, and size. Applitools allows developers to verify that each UI element does not overlap or hide other UI elements.

What are visual bugs?

Applitools’ visual AI finds visual differences. Those visual differences are visual bugs.

Applitools’ visual AI does the same job as spot-the-difference games from childhood. Applitools finds those visual differences (or bugs) in your mobile or web apps. Applitools finds those visual differences (or bugs) at a much-accelerated speed.

Examples of visual bugs

Here are some examples of visual bugs:

Fragmented Android Market

Due to the fragmentation of Android devices market, Android apps may visually behave differently on different devices. Because Android apps may visually behave differently, visual testing becomes more critical for Android apps.

With time-to-market becoming an important factor in improving customer experience, there is more pressure on QA teams to run visual tests. QA teams run visual tests across a vast number of devices. QA teams run visual tests in the easiest way possible.

Testing mobile apps on physical devices or using device farms is cumbersome. Testing mobile apps on physical devices or using device farms is slow. Testing mobile apps on physical devices or using device farms is expensive to manage. Device farms and physical devices often deter scaling visual tests on as many devices as possible.

Parallel visual testing with Genymotion

To solve that problem, Applitools teamed up with Genymotion to make parallel visual testing far easier for QA engineers.

Genymotion SaaS is a powerful Android emulator on the cloud. Genymotion SaaS runs your Appium tests. Genymotion SaaS reduces app’s time-to-market.

Genymotion SaaS uses flexible per-minute pricing. Engineers can manage testing costs by scaling up or down the number of devices.

Genymotion SaaS allows testers at any level to sign up on-demand. Genymotion SaaS allows testers at any level to try the solution on-demand. Genymotion SaaS does not require a contract.

Applitools and Genymotion SaaS

Our teams decided to work together with Applitools. Our teams worked together with Applitools to solve a common problem that users were facing. Users needed to test the visual portions of an app on all the Android devices at the same time.

Engineers can parallelize visual UI tests using Applitools and Appium. Engineers can parallelize visual UI tests across all Android Genymotion SaaS virtual devices at once.

Parallelizing visual UI tests allows detection of bugs as soon as possible. Parallelizing visual UI tests allows teams to spend less time on test runs.

QA engineers appreciate testing mobile applications on a large number of Android devices and screen sizes. QA engineers note that physical devices make this hard to scale. Using Genymotion SaaS virtual devices speeds up parallel tests even faster.

Collaboration between Applitools and Genymotion SaaS allows faster visual comparison on more configurations. Collaboration between Applitools and Genymotion SaaS also supports viewing previous builds.

This article shows steps to parallelize your Appium tests. This article shows steps to perform visual testing. This article shows steps to run those tests across a number of Android devices on Genymotion SaaS.

Running Appium visual tests using Applitools on Genymotion SaaS

1. Write your Appium tests using the Applitools SDK for Appium for taking screenshots for visual testing. You’ll use the udid capability in your tests to define on which Genymotion device you’ll run the tests. This can be known in advance as for Genymotion devices, adb serial is localhost:XXXXX where XXXXX is a port number that can be defined in advance (cf gmsaas below). 2. Launch Genymotion SaaS devices via gmsaas command line. Read here. 3. Run visual tests across Genymotion SaaS devices using Appium.

For in-depth information on setting up Applitools and Genymotion SaaS devices, and running those tests, recommend reading read this step-by-step tutorial.

Video tutorials are also available. The page links to how to run Applitools visual tests using Genymotion devices.

More about Genymotion and Applitools

Find out more about Genymotion. Sign up for a sign up for a Genymotion SaaS account to get started free with $50 worth of credits now.

Find out more about Applitools. You can read their thoughts on using Genymotion, Appium & Applitools to test Android apps. You can request a demo. You can sign up for a free account. You can view their Appium tutorial.

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