In this digital age, everyone wants quick information in their fingertips and most of the businesses wish to give a better mobile app experience to their users. This is because mobile usage is increasing more than ever, and it becomes a significant part for app developers and businesses to build a quality app the right way to target their audience.

For this reason, there are so many mobile app development frameworks available in the market. In that, one is React Native mobile apps.

React Native outsourcing is nothing but a cross-platform open-sourced mobile app development framework like PhoneGap and it is used to build an extensive app for Android and iOS smartphones. Moreover, to ensure those developed react native mobile apps works across different devices smoothly.

This is where you need the right React Native apps testing tools are required. In order to find bugs and issues much faster and resolve them at the lighting speed automation testing is said to be better.

Hence by reading this article, you will come to know,

1. What is React Native?
2. Why choose React Native for Mobile app development?
3. Different types of testing for React Native apps
4. Top 10 testing tools for React Native Mobile Apps.
5. Takeaway

What is React Native?

React Native is an open-sourced JavaScript framework for writing real, natively rendering mobile applications for iOS and Android and it was launched by Facebook.

React Native, primarily used for building attractive user interfaces along with user experience that allows JavaScript developers to build native mobile apps and also hybrid apps that provide native-like feel.

Moreover, React Native is currently trending as a cross-platform mobile app development framework.

Reasons to Choose React Native for Mobile app Development?

Listed below are the top 6 powerful reasons that say  react Native is the best one.

• It saves Time and Money and thus works under tight budget constraints.
• It uses same code for developing both Android and IOS applications and thus offers cross-platform mobile app development
• React native mobile app development allows you to perform tasks that are complex using simple codes, thus enabling Multiple outcomes and suppleness under one undemanding solution.
• The journey of the developer from transforming a web page to the mobile app is super easy and there is no need for any core developer team to keep accessing the app.
• With less usage of memory, the 3rd party plugins became much easier and it provides  smoother run-time.
• React Native is purely focussed on UI design. Hence, it is  greatly responsive and its rendering abilities are by far the best.

Different types of testing for React Native apps:

Below are the different types of testing that are carried out for React Native apps in order to achieve the goal of the app without any bugs and issues.

• Unit testing:

This is the very basic kind of testing followed for every mobile app. This includes testing JavaScript methods and objects which are present at the component level.

• Component testing:

Here, it is possible to test each of the react native components functionally or visually. Here, ReactTestUtils is used in order to test React components, that offers a simple framework.

• Integration testing:

The other testing is integration testing. In this testing, a bunch of different units are tested together as a single entity or component.

• Functional testing:

This is a type of black-box testing which mainly focuses on user interactions and requirements. This covers all the user interactions, underlying software the application as an one entity.

Here are Top 10 Best Tools for Testing the React Native Mobile Apps.

Top 10 testing tools for React Native Mobile Apps.

Below are the top 10 React Native mobile app testing tools which play a vital role in accelerating the speed of app development. Without delaying, Let’s get started.

1. JEST:

Jest is a delightful JavaScript testing framework that works with simplicity. To put it in simple words, it is used to solve the issues that are in the JavaScript codebase.

Jest, built by Facebook, a JS testing framework that works perfectly with React Native on a default basis.

Probably, React native developers use this tool because of the following services that Jest offers:

• “Zero Configuration” which makes JS testing solution easy
• Built-in code coverage that  reports without additional libraries support
• Jest Snapshot testing that simplifies the testing process
• Fast and Safe
• Easy mocking

2. DETOX:

Detox is an end-to-end UI testing library which is mainly used for apps that are built on React Native. Detox testing tool  is designed in a way to solve the problem of slowness and flakiness for mobile UI testing.

Some of great features that Detox holds and  allows the developers to use this testing automation is because:

• Detox monitors the asynchronous operations in the app and reduces the flakiness
• It is easy to be connected to any CI systems and is known for its popularity in cloud testing services
• It is a kind of grey-box testing react native tool so it can access the code and data from your mobile apps.
• Comparing to other third-party UI test automation, Detox is more debuggable
• This community is growing faster than before.

3. Cypress:

Cypress is a famous open-source react native testing tool which lets you write tests much faster and also helps you to use it with much less setup efforts.

Moreover, cypress is a secure and reliable way of testing mobile applications which run on a browser. 

Some of its unique services include:

• Time Travel
• Real-time reloads
• Debug ability
• Automatic waiting
• It works on any front-end framework or website.
• It focuses on end-to-end testing and is considered as all-in-one

4. Enzyme:

Enzyme is a free JavaScript testing tool which is readily used for testing the various React components and checking the output.

Hence, by knowing the output, it becomes much simpler totraverse, manipulate and simulate runtime.

Moreover, the API is intuitive and flexible by mimicking jQuery’s API for DOM manipulation and traversal.

5. InVision:

InVision is  yet another free open-source React-Native tool which was created by InVision in 2011. It is also available at paid as well.

It is a type of digital testing tool that focuses on enhancing the user experience during the development of app designing process.

Invision unique services on offer include animation, prototyping, collaboration, and designing. 

6. React Native Tools:

React Native Tools is nothing but  a Visual Studio Code extension. As it offers a helpful environment for the projects that build on React Native.

Moreover, using this extension, you will be able to quickly run the React native commands and it helps the developers during the code debugging process.

The free tool was developed by Microsoft and it runs the react-native command using the command palette.

7. Karma:

Karma , this is another popular react native testing tool that aims at developing a productive testing environment for the Mobile app developers.

In such a situation, it will be completely focused on saving the developers from a large number of configurations and just letting them write the code for the tests and get instant feedback.

Getting such instantaneous feedback will make the developers more creative as well as productive.

A few reasons that makes Karma unique among other testing tools include:

• Test on real devices
• Testing framework agnostic
• Remote control
• Easy debugging
• Open source
• Continuous integration

8. Mocha:

Mocha is another JavaScript test  framework which is feature-rich and runs in the browser and on Node.js. This makes asynchronous testing fun, flexible and simple.

Moreover, Mocha runs serially and helps in finding and mapping exceptions that are uncaught to the right test cases. It is hosted by GitHub and it enjoys 17,623 stars on GitHub.

Some of the top unique features that allow developers to use Mocha are:

• Browser support
• Test coverage reporting
• Test retry support
• Extensible reporting
• Node debugger support
• JavaScript API for running test

9. Appium:

Appium is an open source test automation framework which is used for automating mobile web, native and hybrid applications on Android , iOS  and Windows desktop platforms.

Appium supports cross-platform apps, so that you can  write and tests using a single API and then run them against multiple platforms.

In short, Appium testing tool makes the code reuse among different test suites possible. This eventually made many of the desired developers to choose the best appium training institutes to advance themselves in the field of mobile app automation. 

Some of the unique features of Appium include:

• To automate your app, you are not supposed to  recompile or modify it.
• To write and run tests, you are not limited to a specific framework or language.
• Using Appium libraries, it is quite easy to develop test scripts and it also helps in testing mobile applications that run on both Android and iOS mobiles.
• It is an open-source mobile and only mobile app testing tool.

10. Calabash:

Calabash, yet another popular cross-platform react native testing tool to write and execute acceptance tests. It supports cross platform mobile apps, that is, it can be used for iOS and Android native apps.

This testing tool is developed and maintained by Xamarin and is open source and free.

As it comes with libraries, thus letting codes to test and interact with native and hybrid apps programmatically.

Some of its unique features include:

• Supports entire app testing
• Automate testing for mobile app

Takeaway:

From the above discussion, we have come to know the top 10 famous React Native testing tools that are developed in a way to deliver responsive mobile applications in a short span of time.  Moreover, test automation framework that we discussed here are the most popular ones which are used to take care of native apps, the mobile web, hybrid apps and React Native apps.

Thus, with the ever rising popularity of React Native, if you’re a React Native app developer, you can make use of these tools to deliver high-quality mobile apps like Facebook Ads Manager, Bloomberg, AirBnB, Gyroscope, Myntra, UberEats, Instagram, Discovery V, etc.

Author bio:

Janani is an enthusiastic content manager who loves to explore in the field of automation testing of mobile apps. With a goal to fulfill her enthusiasm, she founded a perfect place to grow- Zuan technology!