DOM inspection - Android vs. iOS

Hi all,

I’m sure most of you realized when inspecting a native Android app is very different to an iOS app. Obviously native components and DOM structure aren’t the same between SOs… The difference what I mean is the DOM elements you’re able to inspect:

While in iOS you can inspect the whole ‘activity’ DOM, in Android you’re able only to inspect the DOM part that is currently in the device viewport. As long I can understand that’s caused by the RecyclerView Android component, which ‘destroyes’ the DOM elements that is not currently in screen.

That’s really annoying when iOS apps brings a really huge DOM, checking existence of elements and/or introduces a lot of platform-dependency to test scripts.

So, there is any possibility to unify that behavior from the Appium user side? Showing all Android DOM (just like iOS) or truncate part of iOS DOM (just like Android). Both ways has its advantages and disadvantages, however both of them works for me.

Thank you all!

Try to set ignoreUnimportantViews option to false if you use UIA2. It can be changed in runtime after a session is created via appium settings interface