Google has open sourced a software that will benefit developers in building and testing user interfaces for iOS apps. Named as EarlGrey, the software has an array of features that developers can use. The software is now available as an open source under Apache licence.
EarlGrey has been written in Objective-C, and developers can download the software from GitHub. Google has been using the same code to run tests for its apps available on the App Store.
Several Google apps like YouTube, Calendar, Photos, Translate, Play Music and many more have successfully adopted the framework for their functional testing needs,
stated Siddartha Janga in a blog post.
EarlGrey becomes second such software to be open sourced by Google for developing iOS apps. Earlier in 2012 the tech giant had launched J2ObjC, which was written in Java. The Alphabet subsidiary has also released a guide to getting started for developers and a documentation explaining the tools. EarlGrey is supported in all iOS devices running on iOS 8 and above.
With EarlGrey, developers can use the built-in synchronisation that supports animations, and network requests to aid the software’s communication with the user interface. This helps the developers to write codes easily and build tests that are relatively easy to maintain.
Once the software begins interacting with the user interface, developers can keep a track of the progress and can see which functions are currently working. Developers can even add EarlGrey to their Xcode project file and can even use CocoaPods.
CocoaPods are the official SDK library launched by Google that serve as the source for the search giant and iOS app development. Using CocoaPods developers can easily build apps around Android and iOS platforms interactions.
Google has also announced the launch of Cloud Test Lab, a new testing ground for apps that can be used by developers to automatically test apps.
