Publication date
2024-04-23
Mobile visual testing and why it matters
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.
Visual testing is an important aspect of mobile automation 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 a QA team has not tried visual testing before, that QA team may find many visual bugs with an automated visual testing tool like Applitools.
Manually finding visual bugs is painfully difficult.
Comparing hundreds of images of a mobile app is painfully difficult.
Visual testing is linked from the article.Applitools capabilities for visual regression testing
Applitools provides AI-powered visual regression testing of applications.Applitools allows cross-platform testing to identify visual bugs.
Applitools focuses on visual aspects of an app.
Applitools plays a major role in exposing visual differences between baseline snapshots.
Applitools also exposes visual differences between baseline snapshots and current snapshots.
Applitools also exposes visual differences between baseline snapshots and future snapshots.
Applitools provides an AI powered end-to-end visual testing and monitoring solution.
The solution helps developers, test automation engineers, QA professionals, and DevOps teams automatically run visual tests at scale.
Visual tests run across every app, browser, OS, and screen size.
Applitools allows developers to verify UI elements on each page. UI element verification includes UI element color. UI element verification includes UI element shape. UI element verification includes UI element position. UI element verification includes UI element size. UI element verification includes checking whether UI elements overlap. UI element verification includes checking whether UI elements hide other UI elements.
What are visual bugs?
Visual bugs are visual differences in mobile or web apps.
Applitools’ visual AI finds visual differences.
Visual differences are also called visual bugs.
Applitools finds those visual differences at a much-accelerated speed.
See for yourself here is linked from the article.Examples of visual bugs
Here are some examples of visual bugs:
- Text blocking buy button on Southwest Airlines website (Source: Applitools)
- Box blocking shopping cart on ThredUp Website (Source: Applitools)
Fragmented Android Market
Fragmented Android devices market causes Android apps to behave differently on different devices.
Because Android apps may behave differently across devices, visual testing becomes more critical for Android apps.
Time-to-market is an important factor for improving customer experience.
QA teams face pressure to run visual tests across a vast number of devices in the easiest way possible.
Testing mobile apps on physical devices is cumbersome. Testing mobile apps on physical devices is slow. Testing mobile apps on physical devices is expensive to manage. Physical device testing often deters scaling tests on as many devices as possible.
To solve that problem, Applitools teamed up with Genymotion. Applitools and Genymotion make parallel visual testing far easier for QA engineers.
Genymotion SaaS is an Android emulator on the cloud. Genymotion SaaS runs Appium tests. Genymotion SaaS reduces app’s time-to-market. Genymotion SaaS has flexible per-minute pricing. Engineers manage testing costs by scaling up or down the number of devices. With Genymotion SaaS, testers at any level can sign up here. With Genymotion SaaS, testers at any level can try out the solution on-demand. Genymotion SaaS does not require a contract.
sign up here is linked from the article.Applitools and Genymotion SaaS collaboration
Teams decided to work together with Applitools.
The teams solved a common problem for users.
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 parallelize visual UI tests across all Android Genymotion SaaS virtual devices at once. Parallelization allows detection of bugs as soon as possible. Parallelization reduces time spent on test runs.
QA engineers appreciate large-scale testing across many Android devices and screen sizes. Large-scale testing is hard to scale with actual physical devices. Genymotion SaaS virtual devices speed up parallel tests. Applitools and Genymotion SaaS collaboration enables faster visual comparison. Faster visual comparison runs on more configurations. Applitools and Genymotion SaaS collaboration also enables seeing previous builds.
Article scope
This article will show the steps.
These steps parallelize Appium tests for visual testing.
These steps run those visual tests across a number of Android devices on Genymotion SaaS.
Running Appium visual tests using Applitools on Genymotion SaaS
Step 1: Write Appium tests using the Applitools SDK for Appium
Write Appium tests using the Applitools SDK for Appium for taking screenshots for visual testing.
Use the udid capability in tests.
Use the udid capability to define which Genymotion device runs the tests.
Genymotion device identifiers can be known in advance.
For Genymotion devices, adb serial is localhost:XXXXX.
XXXXX is a port number.
A port number can be defined in advance.
The port number note appears as “cf gmsaas below” in the article.
Appium tests is linked from the article. udid capability is linked from the article. adb serial is linked from the article.Step 2: Launch Genymotion SaaS devices via gmsaas command line
Launch Genymotion SaaS devices via gmsaas command line.
Read the linked content for this step.
Read here. is linked from the article.Step 3: Run visual tests across Genymotion SaaS devices using Appium
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, read the step-by-step tutorial.
read this step-by-step tutorial. is linked from the article.The article also includes video tutorials. The videos describe how to run Applitools visual tests using Genymotion devices.
how to run Applitools visual tests using Genymotion devices is linked from the article.More about Genymotion and Applitools
Find out more about Genymotion.
Sign up for a Genymotion SaaS account to get started free with $50 worth of credits now.
Genymotion is linked from the article. for a Genymotion SaaS account is linked from the article.Find out more about Applitools. Read Applitools thoughts on using Genymotion, Appium & Applitools to test Android apps. Request a demo. Sign up for a free account. View an Applitools Appium tutorial.
using Genymotion, Appium & Applitools to test Android apps is linked from the article. request a demo is linked from the article. free account is linked from the article. their Appium tutorial is linked from the article.