I'm trying to create a framework that will automate my mobile website tests. I will be using firebase test lab which only supports espresso and UI Automator. I only have experience with Appium for mobile testing. I was wondering if there's any way to automate browser actions in Espresso or UI Automator. I can't really find anything online, no example whatsoever. Tldr is possible to control browser with espresso or UI Automator or do they only work with provided apk?

  • How deep did you search? This is what google shows first for the query automate browser actions in espresso: developer.android.com/training/testing/espresso/web – Alexey R. Oct 16 '18 at 15:21
  • Thanks for the anwser Alexey, I've seen that one but I don't think it's going to work for me. Doesn't it only work with built in app browsers? I don't have any app therefor I won't he able to provide any apk, I want to run my tests on the Chrome itself. – Adamus77 Oct 16 '18 at 16:15

I've just took a look into firebase test lab and they state that

Firebase Test Lab is a cloud-based app-testing infrastructure

So picking firebase test lab as a framework for testing web-sites through the well-known browsers seems to be a wrong choice since you need to have the access to the application code that you're going to test.


There's no way at the moment to test a website using espresso or uiautomator via the standalone browser i.e. chrome.apk on Android.

You can open a chrome.apk and inject a website URL using uiautomator, but you can't interact with it enough, to make testable.

You should probably choose other cloud device lab provider, for example:

They all support Appium:

Sauce labs
Perfecto Mobile
Amazon AWS Device farm
Xamarin Test Cloud

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