List items are recognized only after tapping the screen

Issues/Bugs
1

I test a hybrid mobile application. It is built with help of Apache Cordova and uses elements of AngularJS web-framework. I encountered an issue when tests stopped recognizing elements of a list until this list is ‘activated’ by tapping the screen inside the list area. They were initially developed and ran on Appium Studio 11.6 and worked fine. Then they stopped working because of the issue. I thought it had something to do with the behind-the-scenes change of Appium Studio itself and turned to pure Appium Server. But it happens there also. The issue description is below.
Look at attached screenshots I made on Inspector screen of Appium 1.8.1.
The first screen is here https://ibb.co/gZgxod It shows the page with the list once it is loaded. You can see list items but the Inspector does not recognize them as separate elements. The last node in the recognition tree is a web view element that includes an entire list. This node has no children. Once I tap inside the list on the device and refresh the source and screenshot in the Inspector all the list items get recognized as separate elements. See the screenshot here https://ibb.co/fejiTd.

Has anyone encountered the same or similar problem? The application under test has not been changed since the time when test scripts were functioning. I wonder what may have happened with the element recognition.

Test is performed on a real device LG Nexus 4 running under Android 5.1.1.

2

http://appium.io/docs/en/writing-running-appium/web/hybrid/

3

Thanks for the link. I am not sure how it would help me as those list items can be recognized as separate ones if I manually touch the screen. If the issue had something to do with the web view context then why I wouldn’t expect to see it on every control.

Android driver cannot be initialized with ‘autoWebview’:‘true’ in my case anyway.

org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException: It is impossible to create a new session because ‘createSession’ which takes HttpClient, InputStream and long was not found or it is not accessible
Build info: version: ‘3.13.0’, revision: ‘2f0d292’, time: ‘2018-06-25T15:32:14.902Z’
System info: host: ‘D308706’, ip: ‘10.0.75.1’, os.name: ‘Windows 10’, os.arch: ‘amd64’, os.version: ‘10.0’, java.version: ‘10.0.1’
Driver info: driver.version: AndroidDriver