Can Cypress be used to automate native and/or hybrid iOS/Android mobile apps?

Question

I have used tools like Robot Framework in the past that use Appium (under the hood) to automate mobile apps. I was wondering if Cypress has a similar feature or functionality that allows the user to automate mobile apps with it?

Answer 1

Cypress can't automate native mobile apps. It can be used to test mobile apps built with web app frameworks. My own personal experience is that this is fairly complex, and would probably suggest using a different framework built specifically for mobile apps (or the mobile framework your app is built in.) From Cypress:

Do you support native mobile apps?

Cypress will never be able to run on a native mobile app, but we can test some functionality of mobile web browsers and test mobile applications that are developed in a browser, such as with the Ionic framework.

Currently you can control the viewport with the cy.viewport() command to test responsive, mobile views in a website or web application. You can also mimic certain behaviors like swiping using custom commands.

You can read about testing mobile applications with Ionic and Cypress here and see how we manage testing the mobile viewport in the Cypress Real World App.