Hi!
So we are definitely aware of UIAutomation being deprecated by apple. We are working under the assumption the UIAutomation will continue to exist for about 6 months, but will probably get more and more bugs introduced into it and Apple won’t fix them.
We have two new full-fledged iOS drivers currently under construction!
Check out the appium-xcuitest-driver repo. This is a wrapper for facebook’s webdriveragent project. This new driver, which I am currently developing uses XCUITest to run tests on iOS simulators, real devices, and even Apple TvOS.
Advantages of the new XCUITest driver:
- Runs on sims and real devices, including TvOS
- Is able to run on multiple connected devices in parallel
- Is much faster (way faster)
- Less buggy!
- Better control of simulators
- Can dismiss system-level alerts!
Disadvantages:
- Only works on iOS 9.0 and up
- Still no Notification testing
For older versions of iOS, there is also the option to use Facebook WebdriverAgent. Which is simulator-only but back-compatible.
Progress:
In two weeks I will be adding this driver to appium 1.5 (releasing soon on it’s own schedule, but beta is on npm). It won’t be fully-featured, but it covers the most commonly-used webdriver commands. This will be behind a desired capability: automationName: 'xcuitest'. Any help beta testing, or building out more commands will be appreciated. Even just interest to show my managers that people are happy to use it will be good 