---
title: "Appium | Skills We Assign For | Azendo"
description: "Appium for mobile test automation — cross-platform tests, device infrastructure, and the Azendo roles assigned for it."
url: "https://azendo.co/skills/appium/"
---

[Skills](https://azendo.co/skills/) QA and delivery tooling 

# Appium.

Appium automates native, hybrid and mobile web applications on iOS and Android through the WebDriver protocol, driving the platforms' own automation frameworks underneath. Tests are written once against a common API rather than per platform.

## Where Appium fits on a long engagement.

Appium's value is a single test style across both platforms and no application modification required — it drives the shipping binary. For a product with parallel iOS and Android applications that follow the same journeys, that avoids maintaining two separate automation stacks with two sets of expertise.

It is slower and more fragile than the platform-native frameworks, because it works through an additional protocol layer. Device and simulator management is also genuinely hard: Appium suites fail for infrastructure reasons at least as often as for application reasons, and teams consistently underestimate that operational load.

## What an assigned team does with Appium.

The device estate is the real project. Physical devices need charging, updating and occasional replacement; cloud device farms cost real money and have their own queueing behaviour. Neither is free, and both need somebody responsible for them.

That infrastructure is scoped as part of the testing capacity rather than assumed, under [outsource qa testing](https://azendo.co/services/qa-engineering-and-test-automation/) on the same agreement.

## What we use Appium for.

* One suite across iOS and Android Shared journeys automated once where the two applications genuinely follow the same flow.
* Testing the binary that will ship Automation against the release build, with no test-only modification of the application.
* Real devices for the cases that need them Camera, biometrics and network conditions exercised on hardware rather than a simulator.

## How Appium capacity is assigned.

Mobile automation capacity is agreed with the device estate scoped explicitly rather than discovered, as part of [how the monthly fee is built](https://azendo.co/pricing/).

## Roles we assign Appium for

* [Test Automation Engineer QA and test automation](https://azendo.co/services/qa-engineering-and-test-automation/test-automation-engineer/)

## Service lines it sits in

* [QA and test automation](https://azendo.co/services/qa-engineering-and-test-automation/)

Capacity is agreed as a committed monthly capacity across a discipline, not per skill.

## Related in qa and delivery tooling

* [Jira — skill we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/jira/)
* [TestRail — skill we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/testrail/)
* [Jest — skill we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/jest/)
* [React Testing Library — skill we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/react-testing-library/)
* [XCTest — skill we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/xctest/)
* [Espresso — skill we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/espresso/)
* [Detox — skill we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/detox/)
* [Flutter Test — skill we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/flutter-test/)

## Tell us what your roadmap needs Appium for.

A service delivery manager replies with the disciplines we would assign, the monthly capacity and what the first month looks like.

[All skills we assign for](https://azendo.co/skills/)