Guide for Cross Platform E2E Test For Native Mobile APP
This article is a must-read for those experiencing headaches with mobile automation testing in the context of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CICD), particularly when it involves native mobile Apps for Android and iOS. It’s quite challenging to find sufficient resources that cover this specific topic.
Within this article, I will guide you through a detailed step-by-step process on how to create a comprehensive end-to-end test pipeline at no cost, utilizing GitHub Actions for both the iOS and Android platforms. We will be using our beloved WebdriverIO framework throughout the tutorial.
Challenge
Our challenge is to establish a unified pipeline workflow that enables testing of our native mobile application on both the iOS and Android platforms. In a previous article, we thoroughly explored the process of constructing a pipeline for testing an Android app using an emulator with GitHub Actions. To handle the E2E test for the Android component, we will reuse that workflow. However, we still need to address the remaining bigger challenge of creating a separate job for the iPhone/iPad simulator.
During my research, I came across an incredibly useful but often overlooked feature which is, the macOS GitHub runner comes pre-equipped with Xcode, the necessary SDKs for iPhone iOS simulators. This realization sparked an idea in my mind: why not replicate the process we followed for the Android emulator but this time for the iOS simulator? This is particularly exciting because GitHub Actions’ iOS runner supports virtualization, making it a viable option for our purposes.
This feature allows us to build our pipeline without any additional costs (up to a maximum of 2000 minutes).