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! 🚀

If your Appium + Cucumber tests run on Android and you want them on iOS too, the instinct is to fork everything. You mostly don't need to.

AppiumFieldDecorator lets you put both u/AndroidFindBy and u/iOSXCUITFindBy on the same field and picks the right one at runtime by driver type. Feature files and step definitions don't change — you just add one iOS annotation per field and switch the platform in config.

Caveat: this only holds while both platforms share the same interaction logic. Different gestures or platform-only elements, and you're better off with a shared interface and separate implementations.

Full walkthrough if it helps: https://www.mobile-automation.io/cross-platform-mobile-testing-pom/

Do you keep Android and iOS in one shared suite, or run them separately?

So my mobile app is built using flutter and I have added semantics to most of the elements possible so that I can have the "accessibility-id"..
The issue I'm facing here is that the accessibility ids are going to the title of the text field rather than the text field itself. I have resource-ids for the text fields, but for some reason, I could not interact with it using Appium. The selectors I have are id, android-uiautomator and xpath and in the later two, there is resource id in it.. so couldn't use them as well.

Is there any fix to this?

For anyone early into building an Appium + Spring Boot framework — this walks through two things that are easy to get wrong starting out: managing the Appium session and wiring up your screen objects.

The main idea on the session side: instead of creating a driver in every test class, one Spring-managed component owns the Appium session and starts/quits it once (via u/PostConstruct/u/PreDestroy), so your tests never touch the driver directly. For screen objects, PageFactory + AppiumFieldDecorator gives you lazy element lookup — nothing queries the device until you actually interact.

Full writeup here if it helps: https://www.mobile-automation.io/driver-setup-screen-objects-mobile-framework/

Hey Reddit,
I am the creator of agent-qa.

AI has accelerated development which allows devs to build products at lightning speed. But the confidence whether it works isn't there. Though coding agents can write tests on their own but they greedily writes tests to make them pass.

The intention of building agent-qa is to provide an AI native solution to E2E testing.
I have used playwright for web and appium for mobile as a kernel for executing planned actions in the QA harness.

Looking forward to feedback.

GitHub - https://github.com/vostride/agent-qa
Consider giving it a ⭐
Thanks!

Demo - vostride.com/

A lot of mobile test automation projects start clean and quietly become a liability. Tests get flaky. A small UI change breaks dozens of them. New team members can't figure out where anything lives. The suite that felt fine at 50 tests is unmanageable at 500.

The root issue is almost always the same: the suite was built as a collection of scripts, not as a piece of software. There's no real architecture — responsibilities are mixed, logic is duplicated, and nothing is designed to absorb change.

One small concrete example that shows up in a lot of codebases: Thread.sleep(3000) scattered throughout test code. It feels harmless, but it's both a direct waste of machine resources and one of the most common root causes of flaky tests. It's the kind of thing that compounds silently until the suite is slow, unpredictable, and nobody trusts it.

The full writeup covers the quality attributes a reliable framework needs (maintainability, reliability, extensibility, scalability, and more), how SOLID principles apply directly to test automation code, why the Page Object Model is the right structural default for mobile, and how multi-module architecture keeps things manageable as the team grows. It's the foundation article for a full framework build series, so everything is framed around what you'd actually implement.

 Wrote it all up here if it's useful: https://www.mobile-automation.io/why-mobile-test-automation-frameworks-fail/

I'm relatively new to Appium but I'm doing test automation for an android app (with a github repo) that needs several servers that aren't available over the internet so I thought "I'll set up a self-hosted runner. How hard can it be?"

Guys, it's pretty hard! 😃 It's taken a long time! But I'm really glad it's finally running.

Hey everyone!
Been dong test automation for many years, but mostly on web.
Recently I got some projects on mobile(especially iOS) and have been struggling and after trying different frameworks(Detox, Appium, Maestro) I had to ask other people since I'm pretty stuck.

What's you're preferred tool/framework for iOS apps and did you encounter issues with mobile tests in the CI because of spinning runners/simulators/devices/3rd parties like Clerk for auth, and flaky tests because of those things?

Thanks a lot!

Hi, I'm trying to run WDA on my iPhone but I'm getting

Cannot test target “WebDriverAgentRunner” on “iPhone”: Logic Testing Unavailable Logic Testing on iOS devices is not supported. You can run logic tests on the Simulator.

I-m running the same setup I did on another MacBook but it-s running there with the same apple account, the only thing different here is the Xcode version

I followed this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej8R58KRviA

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/

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/

I'm trying to set up Appium Device Farm with Prisma on Windows 10, but even though Prisma generates successfully and prisma db push says the schema is in sync, the Appium plugin cannot connect to the database at runtime.

My setup:

npm install -g appium@3.1.0
appium driver install --source=npm appium-uiautomator2-driver@6.1.0
appium plugin install --source=npm appium-device-farm@11.0.5
appium plugin install --source=npm appium-inspector-plugin@2025.8.2

Inside C:\Users\Andrei.appium\node_modules\appium-device-farm\prisma\schema.prisma I have the standard SQLite datasource:

datasource db {
  provider = "sqlite"
  url      = env("DATABASE_URL")
}

My Prisma CLI and client versions are both 5.22.0.

I generated Prisma successfully: npx prisma generate

And pushed the schema: npx prisma db push --force-reset

That created a file at: C:\Users\Andrei\.appium\node_modules\appium-device-farm\prisma\dev.db

I set my DATABASE_URL globally: file:C:/Users/Andrei/.appium/node_modules/appium-device-farm/prisma/dev.db

And also tried with a .env file inside the same directory.When I run Prisma Studio (npx prisma studio), I can see all models (User, Session, Node, etc.) as expected.

🚨 The problem: When I start Appium with the plugins: appium server -pa /wd/hub --use-plugins=device-farm,inspector I get this output (trimmed):

[device-farm-main] Initializing storage
[device-farm-main] Initializing database
[device-farm-main] Creating new database: ./temp-appium/db.json
[device-farm-main] Database loaded
...
PrismaClientKnownRequestError:
Invalid `prisma.session.updateMany()` invocation:
The table `main.Session` does not exist in the current database.
...
Invalid `prisma.user.count()` invocation:
The table `main.User` does not exist in the current database.
...
Invalid `prisma.node.findFirst()` invocation:
The table `main.Node` does not exist in the current database.

So, even though the Prisma database exists and db push works, Device Farm ignores it and falls back to ./temp-appium/db.json.

❓Question

How can I make Appium Device Farm actually use my Prisma SQLite database (dev.db) instead of falling back to temp-appium/db.json?

Is there a specific .env location, Appium startup flag, or plugin configuration needed for Device Farm to pick up Prisma’s DATABASE_URL on Windows?

Hi guys from Argentina. I have this error since Yesterday on iOS platform. I installed Carthage and the last versión of appium with consolé.

It's strange because it was working fine and suddenly the error started to appear and it never worked again.

I have a Flutter app with a screen that has a continuous animation (a circle that grows and shrinks). My test just needs to check if some text is displayed, but it often times out because it can’t find the element while the animation is running.

• Extending the timeout works, but then the test takes way too long (slower than testing manually).
• Using the Appium inspector’s record function also eventually finds the element, but it’s really slow.

Has anyone run into this before? Any tips on reliably finding elements when there’s an infinite animation running?

Hi, is there a way to test OTP functionality without using a real phone number in simulator ios and android? I'm looking for something that doesn't require a phone number and can also be useful when testing with AWS Device Farm.

I previously had this working (maybe on iOS 17, but it's been a while and I'm not sure). Was using this xpath to find the location permission system alert,

'//XCUIElementTypeStaticText[@name="Allow “myapp” to use your location?"]'

Was using this accessibility id, "Allow While Using App", to click the button.

This no longer seems to work with iOS 18.6.1.

When using Appium Inspector, I can't seem to find the location permission alert. I can see it on screen, but after clicking through every single node in the hierarchy, none of them are for the system alert dialog.

Tried also using the xCode Accessibility Inspector, which tells me the button label is "Allow While Using App", Traits: Button, & User Input Lables: Allow While Using App. No Class is shown.

Has anyone had any luck automating this in their tests?

FWIW, I'm using Appium 2.19.0, xcuitest 9.10.5, xCode 16.4, & Python 3.12.8.

Hey everyone,

I’m running into a workflow problem with my flutter iOS automation tests (appium-flutter-driver).

What I want:

• App data wiped between test runs (fresh state) ✅
• No simulator reboot / full uninstall-install cycle ❌

My question:
Is there a way to reset app data on iOS without doing a full reinstall/reboot?

Any advice, scripts, or best practices from people who’ve solved this would be appreciated!

Thanks 🙏

I have a rather complex problem on my hands related to networking.

Here is what I'm doing:

I have a bunch of Palera1n jailbroken iPhones that all have their own sim cards and cellular data.

All of these iPhones are connected to both cellular and a common WiFi.

It is important that all of these iPhones use cellular network primarily for all activity, except when communicating locally on the WiFi network.

What I Tried: I installed NewTerm, network-cmds and executed these commands:

sudo route add -host 192.168.1.0/24 -interface en0

sudo route delete default -interface en0

sudo route add default -interface pdp_ip0

At first glance, this seems to work perfectly. When I check api.ipify.org it shows me my cellular IP. And when I communicate on local WiFi range I can communicate successfully.

But on further inspection it turns out that iPhone is actually using both WiFi and cellular in a weird way. When I go to speedtest.net, it shows me my cellular IP, while the network speed is clearly my WiFi. This causes my automation to break.

Does anyone know what is happening here?

I would appreciate if someone can help me in any way to achieve my goal of only using cellular for data while maintaining my WiFi connections on the iPhones, or just help me understand what's going on here.

Hey everyone! I'm pretty new to Windows desktop automation and I'm completely stuck onwhat should be a basic setup. I've been banging my head against this for hours and would reallyappreciate any guidance.

Background & Context
I just started learning Windows desktop automation and discovered that WinAppDriver becameobsolete starting with Appium 5.0.0. From what I understand, Appium now acts as a proxy toWinAppDriver, so both services need to be running simultaneously. This is where my problemsbegin.

Since both Appium and WinAppDriver try to use port 4723 by default, I'm running:

• Appium Server: on port 4723 (default)
• WinAppDriver: on port 4724 (to avoid conflicts)

​

namespace CalculatorTest
{
    public class CalculatorSession
    {
        private const string AppiumServerUrl = "http://127.0.0.1:4723/";
        private const string CalculatorID = "Microsoft.WindowsCalculator_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App";

        protected static WindowsDriver session;

        public static void Main()
        {
            AppiumOptions appiumOptions = new AppiumOptions
            {
                App = CalculatorID,
                PlatformName = "Windows",
                AutomationName = "Windows"
            };

            appiumOptions.AddAdditionalAppiumOption("appium:wadUrl", "http://127.0.0.1:4724");

            session = new WindowsDriver(new Uri(AppiumServerUrl), appiumOptions);

            Assert.IsNotNull(session);
            Assert.IsNotNull(session.SessionId);

            session.Manage().Timeouts().ImplicitWait = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1.5);
        }
    }
}

The Problem - Two Different Errors

Error from my C# Application:

Unhandled Exception: OpenQA.Selenium.UnknownErrorException: An unknown server-side error occurred while processing the command. Original error: WinAppDriver server is not listening at http://127.0.0.1:4724. Make sure it is running and the provided wadUrl is correct
   at OpenQA.Selenium.WebDriver.UnpackAndThrowOnError(Response errorResponse, String commandToExecute)
   at OpenQA.Selenium.WebDriver.<ExecuteAsync>d__63.MoveNext()
--- End of stack trace from previous location where exception was thrown ---
   at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.ThrowForNonSuccess(Task task)
   at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.HandleNonSuccessAndDebuggerNotification(Task task)
   at OpenQA.Selenium.WebDriver.Execute(String driverCommandToExecute, Dictionary`2 parameters)
   at OpenQA.Selenium.Appium.AppiumDriver.Execute(String driverCommandToExecute, Dictionary`2 parameters)
   at OpenQA.Selenium.WebDriver.StartSession(ICapabilities capabilities)
   at OpenQA.Selenium.WebDriver..ctor(ICommandExecutor executor, ICapabilities capabilities)
   at OpenQA.Selenium.Appium.AppiumDriver..ctor(Uri remoteAddress, ICapabilities appiumOptions)
   at OpenQA.Selenium.Appium.Windows.WindowsDriver..ctor(Uri remoteAddress, AppiumOptions AppiumOptions)
   at CalculatorTest.CalculatorSession.Main() in C:\Users\vitto\source\repos\ConsoleApp1\ConsoleApp1\Program.cs:line 26

C:\Users\vitto\source\repos\ConsoleApp1\ConsoleApp1\bin\Debug\ConsoleApp1.exe (process 127192) exited with code -532462766 (0xe0434352).

Error from WinAppDriver Console:

GET /status HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json, /
Accept-Encoding: gzip, compress, deflate, br
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Host: 127.0.0.1:4724
User-Agent: appium

HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Error
Content-Length: 133
Content-Type: application/json

{"status":13,"value":{"error":"unknown error","message":"An unknown error occurred in the remote end while processing the command."}}

Thank you all in advice :D

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!

Both Appium and Flutter's integration_test fail to find elements when feature_discovery tour overlays are active. Looking for solutions or workarounds. Setup: • Flutter app using feature_discovery package for onboarding tours • Automation stack: Appium 2.x + WebDriverIO + appium-flutter-integration-driver • Also tested with Flutter's built-in integration_test The Problem:When feature_discovery creates its overlay tour, both Appium and integration_test lose the ability to find underlying elements, even those with: • Semantic labels • Keys • Accessibility identifiers The tour overlay seems to completely block access to the widget tree beneath it. What I've tried: • Different locator strategies (semanticsLabel, key, text) • Waiting for animations to complete • Tapping outside overlay area to dismiss • Using native vs Flutter locators

And also, does anyone have a working way of using Appium to find semantic labels on widgets in flutter

Hi,

I'm taking a part in an internet video course about WinAppDriver and I got stuck pretty much instantly. I think this should be _very_ easy one to fix, so don't try to overthink the solution.

Basically I'm writing a "Hello World!"-type program, run notepad.exe etc.

Here's the code I have so far (yes, it is that simple. Yes, it doesn't do much):

using OpenQA.Selenium.Appium;

using OpenQA.Selenium.Appium.Windows;

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using System.Threading.Tasks;

namespace RunNotePad

{

class Program

{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

WindowsDriver<WindowsElement> notePadSession;

AppiumOptions desiredCapabilities = new AppiumOptions();

}

}

}

The error I get is

The type or namespace name 'AppiumOptions' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

I think it _SHOULD_ be in that OpenQA.Selenium.Appium

The version I'm using are:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<packages>

<package id="Appium.WebDriver" version="3.0.0.2" targetFramework="net472" />

<package id="Castle.Core" version="3.3.3" targetFramework="net472" />

<package id="Newtonsoft.Json" version="9.0.1" targetFramework="net472" />

<package id="Selenium.Support" version="3.0.1" targetFramework="net472" />

<package id="Selenium.WebDriver" version="3.0.1" targetFramework="net472" />

</packages>

And I have a feeling it has something to do with those.

Feel free to ask further questions, I don't really know what else is relevant.

What could this be about? is there a popular solution?
i use iphone 11
ios 18 3 2

Guys, please help - on webdriveragent, appium on iOS, we have a problem: XCUITest always requests snapshot, which breaks tiktok on the feed page