Implicit and explicit waits don’t work well together (especially when the implicit wait is longer than the explicit). This has been a source of frustration from end users. It also differed from the appium ruby console (ARC). ARC uses an implicit wait of 0. This was another source of confusion. I documented it in the v7 release notes .
Is this an intentional change?
We will need to use set_wait(30) going forward to be able to use default 30 secs implicit wait?
Yes, set_wait(30) is required going forward. You can also set this via the default wait appium_lib option during driver initialization (or via appium.txt).