What is Robolectric?
Robolectric is the industry-standard unit testing framework for Android.
With Robolectric, your tests run in a simulated Android environment inside a JVM, without the overhead and flakiness of an emulator. Robolectric tests routinely run 10x faster than those on cold-started emulators.
Robolectric supports running unit tests for 14 different versions of Android, ranging from Lollipop (API level 21) to U (API level 34).
Running tests on an Android emulator or device is slow! Building, deploying, and launching the app often takes a minute or more. That's no way to do TDD. There must be a better way.
Robolectric is a framework that brings fast and reliable unit tests to Android. Tests run inside the JVM on your workstation in seconds.
Key Features:
- Simulated Android Environment: Unlike traditional emulator-based Android tests, Robolectric tests run inside a sandbox environment, eliminating the need for physical devices or emulators for unit testing.
- Comprehensive Testing Capabilities: The framework supports a wide range of Android APIs and components, enabling developers to write comprehensive unit tests for activities, services, broadcast receivers, content providers, and more.
- Fast and Efficient Testing : With Robolectric, tests run swiftly, providing rapid feedback to developers during the development and debugging phases. This speed is crucial for maintaining a productive development workflow.
- Run Tests Outside of the Emulator: Robolectric lets you run your tests on your workstation, or on your continuous integration environment in a regular JVM, without an emulator.
- Because of this, the dexing, packaging, and installing-on-the emulator steps aren't necessary, reducing test cycles from minutes to seconds so you can iterate quickly and refactor your code with confidence.
- SDK, Resources, & Native Method Simulation: Robolectric handles inflation of views, resource loading, and lots of other stuff that's implemented in native C code on Android devices. This allows tests to do most things you could do on a real device. It's easy to provide your own implementation for specific SDK methods too, so you could simulate error conditions or real-world sensor behavior, for example.
- No Mocking Frameworks Required: An alternate approach to Robolectric is to use mock frameworks such as Mockito or to mock out the Android SDK. While this is a valid approach, it often yields tests that are essentially reverse implementations of the application code.
Robolectric allows a test style that is closer to black box testing, making the tests more effective for refactoring and allowing the tests to focus on the behavior of the application instead of the implementation of Android. You can still use a mocking framework along with Robolectric if you like.
While much of the Android framework will work as expected inside a Robolectric test, some Android components' regular behavior doesn't translate well to unit tests: hardware sensors need to be simulated, system services need to be loaded with test fixture data. In those cases, Robolectric provides a test double that's suitable for most unit testing scenarios.
