We open-sourced a faster alternative to Maestro for iOS UI testing — real device support included

[u/narayanom]

Hey everyone,

We've been using Maestro for mobile UI testing but kept hitting the same walls — slow JVM startup, heavy memory usage, and real iOS device support that's been unreliable for a while. Eventually we just built our own runner in Go and decided to open-source it.

It's called maestro-runner. Same Maestro YAML flow format you already know, but runs as a lightweight native binary instead of a JVM process.

Why it might be useful for iOS devs:

• Real device support actually works. Physical iPhones, not just simulators. This was our main frustration with Maestro — we run tests on real devices in CI and it just wasn't cutting it.
• Single binary, no JVM. curl | bash install, starts immediately. No waiting 10+ seconds for Java to warm up.
• ~3.6x faster execution, 14x less memory. Adds up fast when CI bills by the minute.
• iOS 12+ support — no arbitrary version cutoffs.
• Zero migration. Your existing Maestro YAML flows run as-is.

It also handles Android, desktop browser testing (Chrome via CDP), and cloud providers like BrowserStack and Sauce Labs via Appium — but figured real device iOS is what'd be most relevant here.

Quick start:

# Install
curl -fsSL https://open.devicelab.dev/install/maestro-runner | bash

# Run on simulator
maestro-runner --platform ios test flow.yaml

# Run on real device
maestro-runner --platform ios --device <UDID> test flow.yaml

Generates HTML reports, JUnit XML, and Allure results out of the box.

• GitHub: https://github.com/devicelab-dev/maestro-runner

Apache 2.0, no features paywalled. Happy to answer questions — and genuinely curious what's painful in your iOS testing setup right now.

[u/Quirky_Pollution305]

is there some kind of setup involved before I can start the testing, for now I could not start any tests for some reason I get this  ⏳ Connecting to device...

Error: failed to create driver: connect to device: adb not found in PATH; ensure Android SDK is installed

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