Appium Philosophy
Appium is built on the idea that testing native apps shouldn't require including an SDK or recompiling your app. And that you should be able to use your preferred test practices, frameworks, and tools. Appium is an open source project and has made design and tool decisions to encourage a vibrant contributing community.
Use your favorite tools
Appium aims to automate any mobile app from any language and any test framework, with full access to back-end APIs and DBs from test code. Write tests with your favorite dev tools using all the above programming languages, and probably more (with the Selenium WebDriver API and language-specific client libraries).
Requirements
iOS
Mac OSX 10.7+
XCode 4.5+ w/ Command Line Tools
Android
Mac OSX 10.7+ or Windows 7+ or Linux
Android SDK ≥ 16 (SDK < 16 in Selendroid mode)
> sudo npm install -g appium > npm install wd > appium & > node your-appium-test.js