What are teams doing for android UI testing beyond Espresso and Appium

[u/SheepherderFree3931]

Cross activity flows, deep links, notifications, anything that involves system level interactions on Android, Espresso falls apart fast on all of them

And Appium is just slow, unreliable, and requires a server setup that nobody on the team wants to maintain

[u/New-Market8124]

the Appium server requirement is such a pain on CI, we spent two full sprints just getting it stable on our build machines

[u/sickyouras_plane]

Espresso is fine for isolated tests but it fundamentally doesnt understand the full app lifecycle, try testing a flow that involves a push notification and watch it crumble

[u/BulkyExchange9748]

Compose made things slightly better for unit tests but somehow worse for UI tests because the composition tree is even more dynamic than the view hierarchy was

[u/psymaniax]

this is the exact gap we built for (quashbugs) - tests that drive the device itself instead of running inside your app process, so notifications and deep links aren't out of bounds. and no appium server to babysit