Editions Tagged With 'iOS'

Appium usually requires an 'app' capability so that it can launch an app that you want to test. But what if you don't want to test any app in particular? In this case, we can decide to start with the 'Springboard' app, which is another name for the iOS home screen or app launcher.

For real iOS devices, the typical commands to get content from the device clipboard don't work. Instead, we have to rely on automating the UI the way a user would. Luckily, that's not too much to ask for Appium!

Sometimes, for reasons that are currently unfixable, Appium returns screenshots on iOS that don't match the actual orientation of the device screen. This varies based on type of device, iOS version, etc... Luckily, Appium has a special setting you can use to always enforce a certain orientation for the screenshot, if you know what it should be.

One of the greatest features of iPadOS is the ability to run multiple apps at once on the same screen, for a more powerful set of workflows. Using Appium and a bit of thoughtful hackery, we can mimic the user behaviors needed to enter into this Split View Multitasking mode.

iOS apps have the ability to give the user access to shortcut actions that can be taken from the home screen. In this article, we take a look at how to automate that user flow using Appium.

Learn how to record video and view a live stream in a web browser. Also we introduce the `mjpegScreenshotUrl` desired capability.

Appium has built-in commands for using the iOS simulator's ability to simulate successful and unsuccessful Face ID authentication.

Our basic demo test suite can be optimized by 67%, reducing the length of every test from 12.8 seconds to 4.2 seconds.

Mobile devices are not always pure screen--they have physical buttons as well. Using Appium's mobile executeScript methods, it's possible to automate several of the physical hardware buttons on an iOS device.

Using a Proxy, we can capture the exact network packets sent from an iOS simulator and make assertions on their contents or timing. We can even modify the responses at will!

The `fullContectList` desired capability can be used to select a specific webview context displayed on a device, if more than one are present.

Sometimes working with iOS's pesky picker wheels can be an automation challenge. There are two methods for dealing with picker wheels, including a special method custom-designed to work with picker wheels even when the desired value is not known beforehand.

'Siri, how do I automate you with Appium?' While Siri won't have the answer to that question, this edition of Appium Pro does! You can test your app's SiriKit integrations using Appium's `siriCommand` method.

Using a special capability, you can automatically set the permissions necessary to test your app, which makes dealing with iOS system alerts authorizing those permissions a thing of the past. Some extra system setup is required to make this new capability work, but it's worth it.

This is the second part in a full tutorial on getting real iOS devices to work with Appium. Assuming everything is installed and set up correctly, this is what you need to do to make Appium work its magic.

Connecting an iOS device to your computer and setting it up to be automated by Appium for the first time can be challenging; follow along with this post to get all the details you need for a first-time installation

A lot of information is transmitted through the browser console, some of which is very useful, especially in cases of app errors. Using the log retrieval capabilities of the Appium client, we can gather browser console messages for storage as a test artifact or even to make assertions on app state.

When automating web applications using Appium, we sometimes run into situations where clicking an element doesn't appear to do anything in our tests, even though clicking the element manually works. The nativeWebTap capability comes to our rescue!

Alerts in native mobile apps don't always work exactly the same way that alerts in web browsers do, which means we need a bit more than the WebDriver spec can give us. Appium has a special command to help manage the extra buttons that can be present in mobile alerts. In this edition we take a look at how it works on iOS.

Sometimes using the standard Action APIs leads to undesired behavior due to the not-always-perfect mapping between the WebDriver spec and the available mobile automation technologies Appium uses. That's why Appium also makes platform-specific action methods available for 'direct' access to underlying action automation methods.

Push notifications are an essential part of many apps. How can you test that the appropriate messages are sent? Apple doesn't make it easy, but with Appium there's a way to solve the challenge by automating the notifications shade.

Sometimes being able to automate your app-under-test (AUT) is not enough. People don't have just one app on their phone, and oftentimes your app depends on actions taken in another app. How do you test multi-app flows like this? With Appium, of course!

App usability is about more than functionality: if the user experience isn't snappy enough, it can be a big problem. Performance testing and analysis is an important phase of testing. Thankfully, Appium can gather performance data during the course of your iOS tests.

If you've used Appium for any length of time, you've probably encountered the sad fact that, sometimes, xpath element queries are slow. In this newsletter, we explore why that is the case for iOS, and explore the various alternatives to XPath available to us, especially the little-known 'class chain' locator strategy.

It's important to test that user data and user experiences are not broken due to changes between app version upgrades. Appium provides some helpful commands to test iOS app upgrades all within the context of one Appium session.

It's often necessary to automate the photo library of a device as part of testing a mobile app. But how do you ensure that photos you know about get there? In this edition, we walk through the methods required for doing this as part of your iOS app testing.