Is there any why to use Appium to manipulating production app?

Hi everyone,
I was trying to use Appium to manipulate Yahoo Mail. As you can tell it’s not my App and I don’t have the provisioning profile. But I am just doing some simple click and screenshot on the app. Is there any way to achieve this?
Thanks so much for the attention and help.

Hi Olivia,

You can use UICatalog app which is designed for learning if you have apple developer account then you can build this app using provisioning profile using XCode tool … and then you can run it on real device and play with it…

There is no way you can rebuild an app using your provisioning profile until its source code is exposed to u… But you can run and test any app on iOS simulator without provisioning profile using its executable ipa or app file …

Hi amitjaincoer191,

Thanks for the prompt reply!

I am wondering what you mean was instead of using real device, I should use iOS simulator with Appium to play with others production apps. please correct me if I was wrong.

I also did Appium with Android, and realized there some limitations on Android emulator comparing to real devices. Could you please guide me if there is any limitation with iOS emulator as well? Can I accomplish all the manipulations with iOS simulator?

Thanks again!

We can launch and test any app using it’s ipa/app file on iOS simulator without using provisional profile certificate. So usually if we are in learning mode we usually work with simulator. Other wise we need to purchase apple developer program.

But if we want to execute our automation test cases of app on real iOS device then we require app to be build using provisioning profile containing iOS real device UDID . Now this provisioning profile certifies that this development executable build can be installed and executed on iOS device whose udid is mentioned in provisioning profile. This is mandatory else during launch itself it will throw error. We can create provisioning profile only if we have an apple developer account (which is paid).

Also I feel performance of a simulator is far better then emulator.

I see. Thank you for the explanation.

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Hi,

We are trying to run our company production .app/.ipa file in real device but as this is been signed with distribution profile I can’t run my appium tests. Could someone suggest how can we achieve to run production app in real device via appium? Is there any other profile it needs to signed with to get it working in appium?

Thank you