Ask HN: Android developers, how do you write UI tests for your app?

#1

Post by _vrov » Sat, Jan 09, 2021, 10:38 AM UTC

I recently started making Android Apps and was curious to know how the community writes UI tests.

- Do you rely on automated UI tests or manual or both?

- How do you write automated UI tests? Is Espresso good enough?

- Where are the devices present? Locally or something like AWS farm?

Re: Ask HN: Android developers, how do you write UI tests for your app?

#2

Post by qetuo13579 » Sat, Jan 09, 2021, 12:09 PM UTC

We have a handheld product (custom hardware) that we struggle to test. Currently it’s all manual testing but lately I’ve been wondering how to increase test coverage and automate it too.

Re: Ask HN: Android developers, how do you write UI tests for your app?

#3

Post by _vrov » Sat, Jan 09, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

qetuo13579 wrote: post #2

We have a handheld product (custom hardware) that we struggle to test. Currently it’s all manual testing but lately I’ve been wondering how to increase test coverage and automate it too.

Are you looking to test the hardware or the software (which I assume is Android based)?

Re: Ask HN: Android developers, how do you write UI tests for your app?

#4

Post by qetuo13579 » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 7:14 AM UTC

_vrov wrote: post #3

qetuo13579 wrote: post #2

We have a handheld product (custom hardware) that we struggle to test. Currently it’s all manual testing but lately I’ve been wondering how to increase test coverage and automate it too.

Are you looking to test the hardware or the software (which I assume is Android based)?

Software. It’s not Android, just Linux developed with Buildroot. We do have a web interface with a remote control feature that displays the screen and allows us to trigger buttons. I’m thinking we can use that interface to automate some basic tests but it might need to involve some image pattern recognition to test the output of an operation.