Android automation tools/frameworks

As we all know the market of android based devices is increasing day by day. Due to this lot of companies are developing android based applications. These applications can be categorized as following:

• Native apps - Apps that are developed using native android classes and runs on the device android OS.
• Webapps - These apps are actually web-applications  that are customized to work with Android based mobile devices.
• Hybrid apps - These apps are the mix of Native and Web based development. Such kinds of apps have some Native coding to interact with device hardware resources like camera,recorder, speaker etc. along with some web based components to directly serve the pages from a web-application itself.

With such a variety of apps in the market the QA will have a difficult task in hand, that is to automate such applications. There are a lot of tools and frameworks available in the market that can help you with automating the android apps. In this blog I will list a few of them and basic info about it. Following are some of the opensource apps available in the market:

• Robotium - Android automation framework built over Android instrumentation testing provided by the Android itself. This is currently one of the major frameworks available that can be used a base for your android app automation. More info at: http://code.google.com/p/robotium/
• NativeDriver - Extension of Selenium webdriver for Native android automation.This currently discontinued and no further support or development is being done on it. More info at: http://code.google.com/p/nativedriver/
• Bot-bot - An Opensource android automation project built over Robotium and NativeDriver frameworks. Comes with recording features to record user actions and export them as test case. It currently supports recording user actions of native application elements and new work is going on to support recording on Web-based/Hybrid apps. More info at: http://imaginea.github.com/bot-bot/
• MonkeyTalk -  Monkey talk is based on Android instrumentation testing provided by android. It have recorder which can be used as a eclipse plugin. The tool seems to be unstable and there is not much changes/ bug fixes that is seen.
• Calabash - Calabash is another android/ios automation tool available in the market which uses cucumber as its base. More info is available at: https://github.com/calabash/calabash-android

Will keep on updating the list whenever I find something new.