We performed a comparison between Appium and Xamarin Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Mobile Development Platforms solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We get a list that shows all devices that are connected to the system."
"I haven't explored other solutions in this particular area, but what I like best about Appium is the fact that it shares functions with Selenium. The extension of Selenium functions allows me to use all of the methods that exist in that domain, and it just makes it simpler for me. I've been using Selenium for some time as well, so using Appium just seems like a natural fit for me."
"Appium has easy interaction with mobile."
"Appium's best feature is that it supports multiple frameworks."
"Obviously because of automation, it reduces manual testing efforts."
"The solution is easy to use."
"It has great documentation and excellent community support."
"The best feature of Appium is that it allows you to inspect the element. With the Appium Inspector, you don't have to install another application to do the inspection. I also like that Appium has Android device connectivity. Currently, most people use Appium as automation software, and I haven't found any other tool that's more powerful than Appium."
"It significantly reduces development and test costs, and ensures that there is synergy between the platforms on product features and user experience."
"Plugins like MvvmCross make a developer’s life easy."
"Xamarin.Forms are very useful. Essentially, it's a framework that allows me to create the UI mostly in XAML. This XAML code is then translated into the native UI elements for each respective platform."
"The most important impact is the reduction in product lifecycle costs."
"On the market, compared to everyone else, they're the top solution. They're the best solution out there that I could see."
"The technical support is very good and it's close to native."
"The combination of forms for cross-platform UI and C-Sharp for the programming language are my two favorite features."
"It brings about good code sharing strategies, which bring down cost and maintenance efforts."
"Stability is an area that needs some improvement."
"If it had more facility for configuration it would be a spectacular solution."
"What needs improvement in Appium is its documentation. It needs to give more context on the libraries that Appium is using under the hood. For example, my team is using Appium for Android automation, and a lot of times, I feel that there's functionality that's available through the Appium interface, that exists within the UIAutomator, but there aren't a lot of useful or helpful resources on the internet to find that information, so it would be good to have some linkage with the underlying platform itself. Another room for improvement in Appium is that it's buggy sometimes. For example, at times, there's a bug in the inspector application that doesn't allow me to save my desired capability set, so it would be nice to get that bug fixed, but overall, Appium is a good tool. The Touch Actions functionality in Appium also needs improvement. For example, if I want to initiate a scroll on the device that I'm running Appium on, sometimes Swipe works, but in other situations, I have to explicitly use action chains, so I'm not too sure what's the better approach. What I'd like to see in the next version of Appium is a more intelligent and more intuitive AppiumLibrary, in terms of identifying menus and scroll bars, etc., because right now, I'm unsure if I have to do a lot of export reversals to get to the elements I'm looking for. It would be nice to have some functionality built in, which would allow me to easily get those exports."
"Image recognition could be improved. We have some images in our mobile applications. It should be able to run from the cloud, so we can automate the catcher."
"One thing which can be really helpful is that there is some kind of a recorder made available rather than scripting everything."
"Appium could improve by enabling record and run techniques similar to what they have in other licensing tools, such as Micro Focus. We have to all write the code, and then we can proceed."
"I rarely use Appium nowadays because I'm now at the managerial level, but the last time I used it, whenever I selected and clicked on an element, Appium was very slow. I tried to debug it, but I still couldn't find the problem, so this is an area for improvement in the solution. Another area for improvement lies with the connector and server. For example, the effort to get into the local machine sometimes causes the emulator to become slow, which then leads to failure in testing, and this is the usual issue I've encountered from Appium. An additional feature I'd like added to Appium in its next release is being able to do automation in iOS without using XPath and the name of the element. In Xcode, you can use previous UI tests for detecting elements, but in Appium, you have to use Xpath and the element name instead of being able to directly put the X-UiPath, which is what you can do in Xcode. In iOS as well, sometimes the element doesn't have a name or a path. Sometimes, there's also no element."
"We need some bug fixes for nested elements."
"There is room for increasing the scale a little bit further with the designer in the Visual Studio, more specifically, Xamarin.Android Designer in Visual Studio."
"They need to take a step towards independence from the UI platform. It takes a lot of time to adapt the native controls."
"The debugging functionality could be improved in Xamarin Platform because sometimes it takes very long to move through the stages of setting up the application build to the final deployment on a mobile app that resides in a physical device."
"The solution struggles a little bit with binding libraries."
"The file size is a bit big, so you have to make certain layers."
"In Xamarin.Forms, we have the option to preview our UI designs, but the functionality can be limited. So, this is not fully functional. Since I have some knowledge of iOS, where when you write code or design in the storyboard, your design is immediately visible in the preview."
"We'd like to have some chat support functionality."
"There is limited support for UX widgets."
Appium is ranked 7th in Mobile Development Platforms with 25 reviews while Xamarin Platform is ranked 4th in Mobile Development Platforms with 39 reviews. Appium is rated 8.0, while Xamarin Platform is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Appium writes "It's easy to launch applications". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Xamarin Platform writes "It's about to be retired and replaced with an inferior product, but offers excellent cross-platform development capabilities". Appium is most compared with Tricentis Tosca, Katalon Studio, Perfecto, Apache JMeter and SmartBear TestComplete, whereas Xamarin Platform is most compared with Ionic, Apple Xcode, OutSystems, Mendix and Tricentis Tosca. See our Appium vs. Xamarin Platform report.
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