Appium on android is extremely slow

Hi everyone, I’d really appreciate some help on this if anyone has any advice. Been tackling this for a while but not getting anywhere.

I have a set of tests I run for both Android and iOS versions of an app. In terms of the UI and functionality, the apps are pretty much identical and the accessibility IDs are the same for both versions - so I’m even using the exact same selectors to interact with elements in most cases.

The problem is that when running the tests for Android, commands can take up to 30 seconds to execute, while the same commands will take less than a second on iOS. I’ve googled around and found a few mentions of Android tests running slowly, but no solutions…

I’ve tried running on emulators and a real device. I have also tried disabling things like background animations and GPS.

As anyone else experienced this? Are there any solutions? Are there any alternative drivers for Android?

appium: 1.16

incase it matters:
wdio/cli: 5.16.7
wdio/sync: 5.16.5

try switch to Espresso.

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve tried Espresso but I’m running into the same issue - which to me seems like it could mean it is due to an issue with Appium. Have you come across this problem before?

Did you try check speed for sure with Espresso without Appium?