Proceedings of International Conference on Applied Innovation in IT
2025/12/22, Volume 13, Issue 5, pp.445-452

Application Test Automation in Headless Android Emulator


Oleksii Cherkashyn


Abstract: The rapid growth of Android applications and the acceleration of software release cycles highlight the need for efficient, accessible, and reproducible testing infrastructures. Commercial cloud platforms often address this challenge, providing scalability and device diversity, but they remain costly and inflexible for small and medium-sized development teams. This study proposes a unified, low-cost approach to Android application test automation that consolidates the entire testing infrastructure on a single Windows 10 machine using a headless Android emulator. The methodology is experimental and practice-oriented, focusing on open-source automation frameworks, emulator stability, continuous integration (CI) integration, and optimal resource utilization. Evaluation results demonstrate that tests executed in headless mode are on average 6.6% faster and reduce CPU usage by approximately 5% compared to UI-based emulation, without sacrificing reliability or reproducibility. This work contributes to the body of research on emulator-driven mobile testing by offering a practical, scalable, and reproducible solution, enabling smaller teams to implement complete automation pipelines while reducing dependence on commercial cloud platforms.

Keywords: Android, Android Application Testing, Mobile Test Automation, WebdriverIO, Appium, TypeScript.

DOI: Under indexing

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