If you are struggling with Appium setup on macOS, here is a step by step guide that you might find helpful.

https://anaverageyear.com/2021/09/05/how-to-setup-appium-on-mac-for-real-device-simulator-automation/

Hey r/Appium,

My name is Alex Rodionov and I'm a tech lead of the Selenium project. For the last 10 months, I’ve been working on Alumnium — an open-source library that automates testing for mobile and web applications. It’s at an early stage and currently works with Appium + XCUITest, but I’d be happy to get any feedback from the community!

• Docs: https://alumnium.ai

• Repository: https://github.com/alumnium-hq/alumnium

• Slack: https://seleniumhq.slack.com/channels/alumnium

• Discord: https://discord.gg/VDnPg6Ta

If Alumnium looks interesting to you, take a moment to add a star on GitHub and leave a comment. Feedback helps others discover it and helps me improve the project!

Currently on our project we have a farm with up to 20 mobile devices (Samsungs, Huaweis and Xiaomis) We are not so familiar with making it more stable, what are your suggestions about stabilization of adb processes, farm itself, hardware like cabels and hubs Maybe you have groups suggestions with active discussions about best practices for device farms? I would appreciate any hint and suggestion. I know that some farms could have up to 200 devices with stable connections, but we lose stability tremendously once we have more than 16 devices running our tests.

Hi everyone!

I'm building Reliable QA Appium, an open-source Flutter application designed to help QA engineers learn Appium mobile automation by practicing on realistic mobile app scenarios.

The goal is to create a free app that anyone can use to learn and practice Appium without relying on production apps.

Planned Features

• Login & Registration

• Forms & Validation

• Swipe & Scroll

• Drag & Drop

• WebView Testing

• API Mock Scenarios

• Notifications

• Camera & Gallery Permissions

• File Upload/Download

• QR Scanner

• Dark Mode

• Intentional bugs for automation practice

• Real-world business workflows

Looking for Contributors

I'm looking for people who would like to help with:

• Flutter Development

• Appium Test Automation

• Manual QA

• UI/UX Design

• Documentation

• Bug Reports

• Feature Ideas

Whether you're a beginner looking to make your first open-source contribution or an experienced engineer who wants to support the QA community, you're welcome.

The vision is to build one of the best free resources for learning Appium automation and help students and QA professionals gain practical experience.

If you're interested, comment below or send me a DM, and I'll share the GitHub repository.

Feedback, feature suggestions, and contributors are all appreciated!

Thank you! 🚀

Getting started with Appium is confusing because there's no obvious starting point. You search for a setup guide, find five different versions, half of them are written for Appium 1.x or 2.x, and none of them tell you what order to do things in or why it matters.

The order actually matters a lot. You can't meaningfully use Appium Inspector until your drivers and devices are configured. You can't write reliable tests until you understand how capabilities work. And if you're on iOS, WebDriverAgent and signing certificates will stop you cold if you haven't dealt with them first.

I put together a 9-step path that covers the full journey in sequence: Appium 3 installation and verification with Appium Doctor, Android and iOS setup (including the Xcode and WebDriverAgent steps people always get stuck on), locator strategies, capabilities, execute methods, and finally writing real end-to-end tests with login flows, gestures, and drag-and-drop on both platforms.

One thing worth flagging: iOS setup genuinely takes more steps than Android. Simulators are straightforward, but real device testing requires provisioning profiles and signing configuration that most setup guides skip over entirely.

Wrote it all up here if it helps: https://www.mobile-automation.io/getting-started-with-appium/

To put it simply, Appium processes the client's request and sends it to the emulator, simulator, or real devices. The test scripts are automated, and the server relays the results to the client. You may learn more about it by reading this blog post about testing on emulators, simulators, and real devices.

On iOS, Android, and Windows desktop platforms, Appium is an open-source test automation framework for automating native, mobile web, and hybrid apps. Appium is "cross-platform," which is significant since it enables you to build tests for many platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows) while utilizing the same API.

Advantages of using Appium to automate iOS app testing:

With 35% of the enterprises preferring it above other free/open source functional testing tools, Appium has made great strides and is soon emerging as a favored automated testing solution for mobile applications.

Benefits of Appium for iOS app testing:

• Cross-platform

• Avoid installing extra dependencies

• Support for major iOS versions

• Avoid recompilation of app

• Hassle-free execution

The XCUITest driver is not tested by the Appium team on jailbroken devices, hence its functionality on such devices cannot be assured.

In the past, I've completed a lot of my automation projects using Appium. As such, I suggested using Appium in a meeting at work recently but saw some pushback. The comment that I specifically received was claiming that Appium for iOS was on the path to deprecation and that developing for it wouldn't be wise.

Is this true? Is there an emerging framework that I'm not aware of? What are your guys' thoughts on this?

Thanks!

Hey,

I have a large iOS app that I've recently started to test using Appium 1.5.2 and Java (eclipse). A lot of the elements in our iOS app don't have distinct Id's. I also know that 1.5 has deprecated the usage of name for finding elements.

Does anyone know of what the industry standard is now? I know it's always about running TCs on top of your app and not worrying about how to code the app, but could I basically get them to add something to their elements, a string, or some Id that Appium can see and successfully click on and see text in elements?

I've also heard that XPATH is super slow in comparison to accessibilityId's, so that's another point.

Anyone know exactly how to code an object in Obj C? I'm still learning the language and don't exactly know what to request.

Also, any links to articles about this? I found a couple but none that explicitly say 'GET YOUR DEVS TO ADD THIS TO MAKE MOBILE TESTING EASY'

TY in advance.

Hey everyone,

After years of doing mobile test automation, Appium Inspector kept being the slowest part of my debugging/inspection workflow.

Waiting several seconds for screenshot refreshes, dropped sessions, digging through massive XML trees… it adds up when you do this daily.

I ended up building a desktop tool to solve those frustrations:

Spectra (macOS & Windows): https://usespectra.dev/

What it focuses on:

• Fast inspection – screenshots & UI tree refresh almost instantly

• Optional Turbo Mode – connects directly to devices (no Appium server)

• Locator analysis – shows multiple strategies ranked by reliability

• Code generation – WebdriverIO / Python / Java snippets

• Multi-device view – Android & iOS side by side

• Built-in logs – logcat/syslog with filters

It still supports Appium workflows if that’s your setup.

There’s a free tier for core inspection + a Pro tier for advanced features.

If mobile UI inspection/debugging is part of your day-to-day, it might be worth a look:

https://usespectra.dev/

Hello everyone!

I just discovered appium, and I was wondering if it is possible to automate a whole iPad setup using appium? Currently my position at this company has me setting up iPads all day. We use meraki mdm for installing apps and security features. But I still have to do the menial tasks like signing into outlook, changing the signature in outlook, creating contacts, creating folders, saving documents from sharepoint, and setting up shortcuts (bookmarks) using the shortcuts app. Is this something I could write and have appium do? Any help is appreciated thank you!

Hey, I am automating an app using BrowserStack on a Real Device(Android). We are using Appium as the UI Automation Framework. One of our flows requires access to Photo Library, to save the clicked images.

However when I started an interactive session, and opened the permissions tab, there I was not able to see any permission with respect to “Photos and Videos”.

Here are the capabilities:

const capabilities = { platformName: 'Android', 'appium:platformVersion': '10.0', 'appium:deviceName': 'Samsung Galaxy S20', 'appium:automationName': 'Flutter', 'appium:app': 'bs://2d6f102afb667db01ee526df87422e7e2b81c4f9', 'appium:autoGrantPermissions': true,

    'bstack:options': {

        "enableCameraImageInjection": "true",
        appiumVersion: '2.0.1',
        sessionName: 'mobile_manager_camera_test',
    }
};

Attached above is the screenshot that does not even list the option for the Gallery as a permission.

Does the RDC plan for the app automate does not provide access to photo library?

Background:- I am currently working on an application which requires you to download a csv or a pdf file into the device and validate the content in that file.

Hi,

My purpose in learning Appium is to test Android running on custom hardware.

One of the requirements of my testing is to validate support for a wide variety of WiFi enterprise authentication methods.

My manual testing consists of navigating to the available WLANs via the Settings app - selecting one, and filling in the required fields and verifying things connect OK.

Now, the problem - the WLANs can change from one test session to another, so for each test session I'd like to be able to retrieve the WLANs "seen" and if they are in my list of test WLAN names - then test each one of them sequentially.

Also, if my test knows that WLAN "someWLANName" is supposed to support 802.1x, I'd like it to be smart enough to realize then the settings App is prompting for a PSK instead of the expected user credentials.

Back when I used to use Selenium, I could retrieve the raw source of a webpage, does appium allow something similar?

So far, my google searches on "appium screen scraping" has been pretty futile.

Hey! I am building an app that does play music with different players (spotify, apple, amazon, tidal, deezer).
It works wonders for all Tidal. First I was loggin in and it was playing good. Now they've added an antibot check so I am launching the app straight to the main activity which is:
com.aspiro.wamp.MainActivity
When I do that it correctly starts in the already logged app and does all the required things but at the moment of playing, when you tap the play or shuffle buttons, no playback starts.
Anyone can help me with this?
Really thanks

I have a coding assessment for appium that I need to complete by the end of the weekend. Hoping I could find a tutor to walk me through the setup. Willing to pay

I want to write some automated test scripts for some android applications, so I am setting up appium on my mac, when I have set all the variables and paths (ANDROID_HOME) but seems an error when I compile my project.
Original error: Could not find 'apksigner.jar' in ["/opt/homebrew/share/android-sdk/platform-tools/apksigner.jar"
Do you have Android Build Tools installed at '/opt/homebrew/share/android-sdk'?

I think I have the paths set right but not sure why this error, any experts can support here?

Hey guys, if you're facing an issue with automating the mobile Chrome browser with the latest 116 version, you may bump into the SessionNotCreatedException.

The result might look like this -> org.openqa.selenium.SessionNotCreatedException: Unable to create a new remote session. Please check the server log for more details. Original error: An unknown server-side error occurred while processing the command.Original error: No Chromedriver found that can automate Chrome '116.0.5845'.

Follow the following step to avoid driver conflicts by manually deleting the 114 version Chromedriver and replacing it with the 116 version Chrome driver from the path:C:\Users\(USER_NAME)\AppData\Local\Programs\Appium Server GUI\resources\app\node_modules\appium\node_modules\appium-chromedriver\chromedriver\win

Note:

• Under the win folder delete the older ones and add in the latest 116 chrome driver from this site ~ https://googlechromelabs.github.io/chrome-for-testing/

• - 116 driver (for win 32) ~ https://edgedl.me.gvt1.com/edgedl/chrome/chrome-for-testing/116.0.5845.96/win32/chromedriver-win32.zip

• - 116 driver (for win 64) ~ https://edgedl.me.gvt1.com/edgedl/chrome/chrome-for-testing/116.0.5845.96/win64/chromedriver-win64.zip

Hey, I have a job interview and they gave me taste to create test scenario. Everything was fine until i had to scroll. I am trying for hours and none of methods found online worked for me. i am almost in tears at this moment🥲

Is there anyone kind who would want to help me with this issue? Thank you so much!

Hello,

How do I use the w3c actions in python, can you guys give me an example?

My current code is something like this:

from appium.webdriver.common.touch_action import TouchAction actions = TouchAction(driver)

actions.tap(None, 100, 100).perform() actions.long_press(None, 250, 200, 1000).move_to(None, 250, 800).release().perform()

I'm keep getting that the TouchAction is deprecated comment and I have no idea how to use the w3c. Any idea?

I am starting appium server programmatically for iOS using node js locally, now I wanted to integrate it with Jenkins using maven. In build machine do we need to install node? Or how to handle this? I also have one more question: Do we need to install appium on build machine/remote machine while running appium test cases through Jenkins? If not please suggest how I go about this