Imagine you're testing a service to creates, queries and deletes users. A fake version of that service might just be a wrapper on a HashMap keyed by ID. It might have several fields like some personal info, a hashed password, an email address, whether you're verified and so on.

Imagine one of your tests is if the user deletes their account. What pattern of calls should it make? You don't really care other than the record being deleted (or marked as deleted, depending on retention policy) after you're done.

In the mock world you might mock out calls like deleteUserByID and make suer it's called.

In the fake world, you simply check that the user record is deleted (or marked as such) after the test. You don't really care about what sequence of calls made that happen.

That may sound trivial but it gets less trivial the more complex your example is. Imagine instead you want to clear out all users who are marked for deletion. If you think about the SQL for that you might do a DELETE ... WHERE call so your API call might look like that. But if the logic is more complicated? Where if there's a change where EU and NA users have different retention periods or logging requirements so they're suddenly handled differently?

In a mokcing world you would have to change all your expected mocks. In fact, implementing this change might require fixing a ton of tests you don't care about at all and aren't really being broken by the change regardless.

In a fake world, you're testing what the data looks like after you're done, not the specific steps it took to get there.

Now those are pretty simple examples because there's not much to do the arguments used and no return values to speak of. Your code might branch differently based on those values, which then changes what calls to expects and with what values.

You're testing implementation details in a really time-consuming yet brittle way.

There are different kinds of mocks.

Check function XYZ is called, return abc when XYZ is called etc are the bad kind that people were bit badly by.

The good kind are a minimally correct fake implementation that doesn't really need any mocking library to build.

Tests should not be brittle and rigidly restate the order of function calls and expected responses. That's a whole lot of ceremony that doesn't really add confidence in the code because it does not catch many classes of errors, and requires pointless updates to match the implementation 1-1 everytime it is updated. It's effectively just writing the implementation twice, if you squint at it a bit.

The general term I prefer is test double. See https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TestDouble.html for how one might distinguish dummies, fakes, stubs, spies, and mocks.

Of course getting overly pedantic leads to its own issues, much like the distinctions between types of tests.

At my last Java job I used to commonly say things like "mocks are a smell", and avoided Mockito like GP, though it was occasionally useful. PowerMock was also sometimes used because it lets you get into the innards of anything without changing any code, but much more rarely. Ideally you don't need a test double at all.

Mocking is testing how an interface is used, rather than testing an implementation. That's why it requires some kind of library support. Otherwise you'd just on the hook for providing your own simple implementations of your dependencies.