February 17, 2016 - 10:31 AMT
Google open sources EarlGrey tool for testing iOS apps

Google on Tuesday, February 16 announced that it has open-sourced EarlGrey, a piece of software that developers can use to more easily build and run user interface tests on source code for iOS apps. Written in Objective-C, EarlGrey is available now on GitHub under an open-source Apache license, VentureBeat reports.

The release is significant because it’s something Google has actually used to test its own iOS apps.

“Several Google apps like YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Photos, Google Translate, Google Play Music and many more have successfully adopted the framework for their functional testing needs,” Siddartha Janga wrote in a blog post on behalf of Google iOS developers.

Of course, iOS isn’t the most important mobile operating system for software development at Google. That would be Android, which has more than 1 billion active users. So it’s interesting to see Google do more to aid iOS development.