Appium UiAutomator2 Driver
Appium UiAutomator2 Driver is a test automation framework for Android devices. Appium UiAutomator2 Driver automates native, hybrid and mobile web apps, tested on emulators and real devices. Appium UiAutomator2 Driver is part of the Appium mobile test automation tool. The driver operates in scope of W3C WebDriver protocol with several custom extensions to cover operating-system specific scenarios.
UiAutomator2 Driver proxies most of the commands to UiAutomator2 server, which uses Google's UiAutomator framework under the hood. Some commands are proxied directly to appium-adb and other helpers built on top of Android platform tools.
Note
Since version 2.0.0 UiAutomator2 driver has dropped the support of Appium 1, and is only compatible to Appium 2.
Use the appium driver install uiautomator2
command to add it to your Appium 2 dist.
Requirements
On top of standard Appium requirements UiAutomator2 driver also expects the following prerequisites:
- Windows, Linux and macOS are supported as hosts
- Android SDK Platform tools must be installed. Android Studio IDE also provides a convenient UI to install and manage the tools.
- ANDROID_HOME or ANDROID_SDK_ROOT environment variable must be set
- Java JDK must be installed and JAVA_HOME environment variable must be set. Android SDK below API 30 requires Java 8. Android SDK 30 and above requires Java 9 or newer.
- Emulator platform image must be installed if you plan to run your tests on it. Android Studio IDE also provides a convenient UI to install and manage emulators.
- Real Android devices must have USB debugging enabled and should be visible as
online
in adb devices -l
output. - The minimum version of Android API must be 5.0 (API level 21) (6.0 is recommended as version 5 has some known compatibility issues).
Doctor
Since driver version 2.39.0 you can automate the validation for the most of the above
requirements as well as various optional ones needed by driver extensions by running the
appium driver doctor uiautomator2
server command.
Capabilities
General
Capability Name | Description |
---|
platformName | Could be set to android . Appium itself is not strict about this capability value if automationName is provided, so feel free to assign it to any supported platform name if this is needed, for example, to make Selenium Grid working. |
appium:automationName | Must always be set to uiautomator2 . Values of automationName are compared case-insensitively. |
appium:deviceName | The name of the device under test (actually, it is not used to select a device under test). Consider setting udid for real devices and avd for emulators instead |
appium:platformVersion | The platform version of an emulator or a real device. This capability is used for device autodetection if udid is not provided |
appium:udid | UDID of the device to be tested. Could be retrieved from adb devices -l output. If unset then the driver will try to use the first connected device. Always set this capability if you run parallel tests. |
appium:noReset | Prevents the device to be reset before the session startup if set to true . This means that the application under test is not going to be terminated neither its data cleaned. false by default |
appium:fullReset | Being set to true always enforces the application under test to be fully uninstalled before starting a new session. false by default |
appium:printPageSourceOnFindFailure | Enforces the server to dump the actual XML page source into the log if any error happens. false by default. |
Driver/Server
Capability Name | Description |
---|
appium:systemPort | The number of the port on the host machine used for the UiAutomator2 server. By default the first free port from 8200..8299 range is selected. It is recommended to set this value if you are running parallel tests on the same machine. |
appium:skipServerInstallation | Skip the UiAutomator2 Server component installation on the device under test and all the related checks if set to true . This could help to speed up the session startup if you know for sure the correct server version is installed on the device. In case the server is not installed or an incorrect version of it is installed then you may get an unexpected error later. false by default |
appium:uiautomator2ServerLaunchTimeout | The maximum number of milliseconds to wait util UiAutomator2Server is listening on the device. 30000 ms by default |
appium:uiautomator2ServerInstallTimeout | The maximum number of milliseconds to wait util UiAutomator2Server is installed on the device. 20000 ms by default |
appium:uiautomator2ServerReadTimeout | The maximum number of milliseconds to wait for a HTTP response from UiAutomator2Server. Only values greater than zero are accepted. If the given value is too low then expect driver commands to fail with timeout of Xms exceeded error. 240000 ms by default |
appium:disableWindowAnimation | Whether to disable window animations when starting the instrumentation process. false by default |
appium:skipDeviceInitialization | If set to true then device startup checks (whether it is ready and whether Settings app is installed) will be canceled on session creation. Could speed up the session creation if you know what you are doing. false by default |
App
Capability Name | Description |
---|
appium:app | Full path to the application to be tested (the app must be located on the same machine where the server is running). Both .apk and .apks application extensions are supported. Could also be an URL to a remote location. If neither of the app , appPackage or browserName capabilities are provided then the driver starts from the Dashboard and expects the test knows what to do next. Do not provide both app and browserName capabilities at once. |
browserName | The name of the browser to run the test on. If this capability is provided then the driver will try to start the test in Web context mode (Native mode is applied by default). Read Automating hybrid apps for more details. Usually equals to chrome . |
appium:appPackage | Application package identifier to be started. If not provided then UiAutomator2 will try to detect it automatically from the package provided by the app capability. Read How To Troubleshoot Activities Startup for more details |
appium:appActivity | Main application activity identifier. If not provided then UiAutomator2 will try to detect it automatically from the package provided by the app capability. Read How To Troubleshoot Activities Startup for more details |
appium:appWaitActivity | Identifier of the first activity that the application invokes. If not provided then equals to appium:appActivity . Read How To Troubleshoot Activities Startup for more details |
appium:appWaitPackage | Identifier of the first package that is invoked first. If not provided then equals to appium:appPackage . Read How To Troubleshoot Activities Startup for more details |
appium:appWaitDuration | Maximum amount of milliseconds to wait until the application under test is started (e. g. an activity returns the control to the caller). 20000 ms by default. Read How To Troubleshoot Activities Startup for more details |
appium:androidInstallTimeout | Maximum amount of milliseconds to wait until the application under test is installed. 90000 ms by default |
appium:appWaitForLaunch | Whether to block until the app under test returns the control to the caller after its activity has been started by Activity Manager (true , the default value) or to continue the test without waiting for that (false ). |
appium:intentCategory | Set an optional intent category to be applied when starting the given appActivity by Activity Manager. Defaults to android.intent.category.LAUNCHER . Please use mobile:startActivity in case you don't set an explicit value. |
appium:intentAction | Set an optional intent action to be applied when starting the given appActivity by Activity Manager. Dfaults to android.intent.action.MAIN . Please use mobile:startActivity in case you don't set an explicit value. |
appium:intentFlags | Set an optional intent flags to be applied when starting the given appActivity by Activity Manager. Defaults to 0x10200000 (FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK |
appium:optionalIntentArguments | Set an optional intent arguments to be applied when starting the given appActivity by Activity Manager |
appium:dontStopAppOnReset | Set it to true if you don't want the application to be restarted if it was already running. If appium:noReset is falsy, then the app under test is going to be restarted if either this capability is falsy (the default behavior) or appium:forceAppLaunch is set to true . false by default |
appium:forceAppLaunch | Set it to true if you want the application under test to be always forcefully restarted on session startup even if appium:noReset is true , and the app was already running. If noReset is falsy, then the app under test is going to be restarted if either this capability set to true or appium:dontStopAppOnReset is falsy (the default behavior). false by default. Available since driver version 2.12 |
appium:shouldTerminateApp | Set it to true if you want the application under test to be always terminated on session end even if appium:noReset is true . If noReset is falsy, then the app under test is going to be terminated if appium:dontStopAppOnReset is also falsy (the default behavior). false by default |
appium:autoLaunch | Whether to launch the application under test automatically (true , the default value) after a test starts |
appium:autoGrantPermissions | Whether to grant all the requested application permissions automatically when a test starts(true ). The targetSdkVersion in the application manifest must be greater or equal to 23 and the Android version on the device under test must be greater or equal to Android 6 (API level 23) to grant permissions. Applications whose targetSdkVersion is lower than or equal to 22 must be reinstalled to grant permissions, for example, by setting the appium:fullReset capability as true for Android 6+ devices. If your app needs some special security permissions, like access to notifications or media recording, consider using mobile: changePermissions extension with appops target. false by default |
appium:otherApps | Allows to set one or more comma-separated paths to Android packages that are going to be installed along with the main application under test. This might be useful if the tested app has dependencies |
appium:uninstallOtherPackages | Allows to set one or more comma-separated package identifiers to be uninstalled from the device before a test starts |
appium:allowTestPackages | If set to true then it would be possible to use packages built with the test flag for the automated testing (literally adds -t flag to the adb install command). false by default |
appium:remoteAppsCacheLimit | Sets the maximum amount of application packages to be cached on the device under test. This is needed for devices that don't support streamed installs (Android 7 and below), because ADB must push app packages to the device first in order to install them, which takes some time. Setting this capability to zero disables apps caching. 10 by default. |
appium:enforceAppInstall | If set to true then the application under test is always reinstalled even if a newer version of it already exists on the device under test. This capability has no effect if appium:noReset is set to true . false by default |
App Localization
Capability Name | Description |
---|
appium:localeScript | Canonical name of the locale to be set for the app under test, for example Hans in zh-Hans-CN . See https://developer.android.com/reference/java/util/Locale.html for more details. |
appium:language | Name of the language to extract application strings for. Strings are extracted for the current system language by default. Also sets the language for the app under test. See https://developer.android.com/reference/java/util/Locale.html for more details. If language is provided then locale is also required to be set. The combination of both capability values must be a known locale and should be present in the list of available locales returned by the ICU's getAvailableULocales() method. The full list of supported locales is also dumped into the logcat output on failure. Example: en , ja |
appium:locale | Sets the locale for the app under test. See https://developer.android.com/reference/java/util/Locale.html for more details. If locale is provided then language is also required to be set. The combination of both capability values must be a known locale and should be present in the list of available locales returned by the ICU's getAvailableULocales() method. The full list of supported locales is also dumped into the logcat output on failure. Example: US , JP |
ADB
Capability Name | Description |
---|
appium:adbPort | Number of the port on the host machine where ADB is running. 5037 by default |
appium:remoteAdbHost | Address of the host where ADB is running (the value of -H ADB command line option). Unset by default |
appium:adbExecTimeout | Maximum number of milliseconds to wait until single ADB command is executed. 20000 ms by default |
appium:clearDeviceLogsOnStart | If set to true then UiAutomator2 deletes all the existing logs in the device buffer before starting a new test |
appium:buildToolsVersion | The version of Android build tools to use. By default UiAutomator2 driver uses the most recent version of build tools installed on the machine, but sometimes it might be necessary to give it a hint (let say if there is a known bug in the most recent tools version). Example: 28.0.3 |
appium:skipLogcatCapture | Being set to true disables automatic logcat output collection during the test run. false by default |
appium:suppressKillServer | Being set to true prevents the driver from ever killing the ADB server explicitly. Could be useful if ADB is connected wirelessly. false by default |
appium:ignoreHiddenApiPolicyError | Being set to true ignores a failure while changing hidden API access policies. Could be useful on some devices, where access to these policies has been locked by its vendor. false by default. |
appium:hideKeyboard | Being set to true hides the on-screen keyboard while the session is running. Use it instead of the legacy appium:unicodeKeyboard one (which will be dropped in the future). This effect is achieved by assigning a custom "artificial" input method. Only use this feature for special/exploratory cases as it violates the way your application under test is normally interacted with by a human. Setting this capability explicitly to false enforces adb shell ime reset call on session startup, which resets the currently selected/enabled IMEs to the default ones as if the device is initially booted with the current locale. undefined by default. |
appium:mockLocationApp | Sets the package identifier of the app, which is used as a system mock location provider since Appium 1.18.0+. This capability has no effect on emulators. If the value is set to null or an empty string, then Appium will skip the mocked location provider setup procedure. Defaults to Appium Setting package identifier (io.appium.settings ). Termination of a mock location provider application resets the mocked location data. |
appium:logcatFormat | The log print format, where format is one of: brief process tag thread raw time threadtime long . threadtime is the default value. |
appium:logcatFilterSpecs | Series of tag[:priority] where tag is a log component tag (or * for all) and priority is: V Verbose , D Debug , I Info , W Warn , E Error , F Fatal , S Silent (supress all output) . '' means ':d' and tag by itself means tag:v . If not specified on the commandline, filterspec is set from ANDROID_LOG_TAGS. If no filterspec is found, filter defaults to '*:I'. |
appium:allowDelayAdb | Being set to false prevents emulator to use -delay-adb feature to detect its startup. See https://github.com/appium/appium/issues/14773 for more details. |
Emulator (Android Virtual Device)
Capability Name | Description |
---|
appium:avd | The name of Android emulator to run the test on. The names of currently installed emulators could be listed using avdmanager list avd command. If the emulator with the given name is not running then it is going to be launched on automated session startup. |
appium:avdLaunchTimeout | Maximum number of milliseconds to wait until Android Emulator is started. 60000 ms by default |
appium:avdReadyTimeout | Maximum number of milliseconds to wait until Android Emulator is fully booted and is ready for usage. 60000 ms by default |
appium:avdArgs | Either a string or an array of emulator command line arguments. If arguments contain the -wipe-data one then the emulator is going to be killed on automated session startup in order to wipe its data. |
appium:avdEnv | Mapping of emulator environment variables. |
appium:networkSpeed | Sets the desired network speed limit for the emulator. It is only applied if the emulator is not running before the test starts. See emulator command line arguments description for more details. |
appium:gpsEnabled | Sets whether to enable (true ) or disable (false ) GPS service in the Emulator. Unset by default, which means to not change the current value |
appium:isHeadless | If set to true then emulator starts in headless mode (e.g. no UI is shown). It is only applied if the emulator is not running before the test starts. false by default. |
App Signing
Capability Name | Description |
---|
appium:useKeystore | Whether to use a custom keystore to sign the app under test. false by default, which means apps are always signed with the default Appium debug certificate (unless canceled by noSign capability). This capability is used in combination with keystorePath , keystorePassword , keyAlias and keyPassword capabilities. |
appium:keystorePath | The full path to the keystore file on the server filesystem. This capability is used in combination with useKeystore , keystorePath , keystorePassword , keyAlias and keyPassword capabilities. Unset by default |
appium:keystorePassword | The password to the keystore file provided in keystorePath capability. This capability is used in combination with useKeystore , keystorePath , keystorePassword , keyAlias and keyPassword capabilities. Unset by default |
appium:keyAlias | The alias of the key in the keystore file provided in keystorePath capability. This capability is used in combination with useKeystore , keystorePath , keystorePassword , keyAlias and keyPassword capabilities. Unset by default |
appium:keyPassword | The password of the key in the keystore file provided in keystorePath capability. This capability is used in combination with useKeystore , keystorePath , keystorePassword , keyAlias and keyPassword capabilities. Unset by default |
appium:noSign | Set it to true in order to skip application signing. By default all apps are always signed with the default Appium debug signature if they don't have any. This capability cancels all the signing checks and makes the driver to use the application package as is. This capability does not affect .apks packages as these are expected to be already signed. |
Device Locking
Capability Name | Description |
---|
appium:skipUnlock | Whether to skip the check for lock screen presence (true ). The default driver behaviour is to verify the presence of the screen lock (e.g. 'false' value of the capability) before starting the test and to unlock that (which sometimes might be unstable). Note, that this operation takes some time, so it is highly recommended to set this capability to true and disable screen locking on device(s) under test. Read the Unlock tutorial for more details. |
appium:unlockType | Set one of the possible types of Android lock screens to unlock. Read the Unlock tutorial for more details. |
appium:unlockKey | Allows to set an unlock key. Read the Unlock tutorial for more details. |
appium:unlockStrategy | Either 'locksettings' (default) or 'uiautomator'. Read the Unlock tutorial for more details. |
appium:unlockSuccessTimeout | Maximum number of milliseconds to wait until the device is unlocked. 2000 ms by default. Read the Unlock tutorial for more details. |
MJPEG
Capability Name | Description |
---|
appium:mjpegServerPort | The number of the port on the host machine that UiAutomator2 server starts the MJPEG server on. If not provided then the screenshots broadcasting service on the remote device does not get exposed to a local port (e.g. no adb port forwarding is happening) |
appium:mjpegScreenshotUrl | The URL of a service that provides realtime device screenshots in MJPEG format. If provided then the actual command to retrieve a screenshot will be requesting pictures from this service rather than directly from the server |
Web Context
Capability Name | Description |
---|
appium:autoWebview | If set to true then UiAutomator2 driver will try to switch to the web view with name WEBVIEW_ + appium:appPackage after the session is started. For example, if appium:appPackage capability is set to com.mypackage then WEBVIEW_com.mypackage will be used. false by default. |
appium:autoWebviewName | Set the name of webview context in which UiAutomator2 driver will try to switch if autoWebview capability is set to true (available since driver version 2.9.1). Has priority over using the appium:appPackage value in webview name. For example, if appium:autoWebviewName capability is set to myWebviewName then WEBVIEW_myWebviewName will be used. Unset by default. |
appium:autoWebviewTimeout | Set the maximum number of milliseconds to wait until a web view is available if autoWebview capability is set to true . 2000 ms by default. |
appium:webviewDevtoolsPort | The local port number to use for devtools communication. By default the first free port from 10900..11000 range is selected. Consider setting the custom value if you are running parallel tests. |
appium:ensureWebviewsHavePages | Whether to skip web views that have no pages from being shown in getContexts output. The driver uses devtools connection to retrieve the information about existing pages. true by default since Appium 1.19.0, false if lower than 1.19.0. |
appium:enableWebviewDetailsCollection | Whether to retrieve extended web views information using devtools protocol. Enabling this capability helps to detect the necessary chromedriver version more precisely. true by default since Appium 1.22.0, false if lower than 1.22.0. |
appium:chromedriverPort | The port number to use for Chromedriver communication. Any free port number is selected by default if unset. |
appium:chromedriverPorts | Array of possible port numbers to assign for Chromedriver communication. If none of the port in this array is free then an error is thrown. |
appium:chromedriverArgs | Array of chromedriver command line arguments. Note, that not all command line arguments that are available for the desktop browser are also available for the mobile one. |
appium:chromedriverExecutable | Full path to the chromedriver executable on the server file system. |
appium:chromedriverExecutableDir | Full path to the folder where chromedriver executables are located. This folder is used then to store the downloaded chromedriver executables if automatic download is enabled. Read Automatic Chromedriver Discovery article for more details. |
appium:chromedriverChromeMappingFile | Full path to the chromedrivers mapping file. This file is used to statically map webview/browser versions to the chromedriver versions that are capable of automating them. Read Automatic Chromedriver Discovery article for more details. |
appium:chromedriverUseSystemExecutable | Set it to true in order to enforce the usage of chromedriver, which gets downloaded by Appium automatically upon installation. This driver might not be compatible with the destination browser or a web view. false by default. |
appium:chromedriverDisableBuildCheck | Being set to true disables the compatibility validation between the current chromedriver and the destination browser/web view. Use it with care. |
appium:recreateChromeDriverSessions | If this capability is set to true then chromedriver session is always going to be killed and then recreated instead of just suspending it on context switching. false by default |
appium:nativeWebScreenshot | Whether to use screenshoting endpoint provided by UiAutomator framework (true ) rather than the one provided by chromedriver (false , the default value). Use it when you experience issues with the latter. |
appium:extractChromeAndroidPackageFromContextName | If set to true , tell chromedriver to attach to the android package we have associated with the context name, rather than the package of the application under test. false by default. |
appium:showChromedriverLog | If set to true then all the output from chromedriver binary will be forwarded to the Appium server log. false by default. |
pageLoadStrategy | One of the available page load strategies. See https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver/#capabilities |
appium:chromeOptions | A mapping, that allows to customize chromedriver options. See https://chromedriver.chromium.org/capabilities for the list of available entries. |
appium:chromeLoggingPrefs | Chrome logging preferences mapping. Basically the same as goog:loggingPrefs. It is set to {"browser": "ALL"} by default. |
Other
Capability Name | Description |
---|
appium:disableSuppressAccessibilityService | Being set to true tells the instrumentation process to not suppress accessibility services during the automated test. This might be useful if your automated test needs these services. false by default |
appium:userProfile | Integer identifier of a user profile. By default the app under test is installed for the currently active user, but in case it is necessary to test how the app performs while being installed for a user profile, which is different from the current one, then this capability might come in handy. |
appium:newCommandTimeout | How long (in seconds) the driver should wait for a new command from the client before assuming the client has stopped sending requests. After the timeout the session is going to be deleted. 60 seconds by default. Setting it to zero disables the timer. |
appium:skipLogcatCapture | Skips to start capturing logs such as logcat. It might improve network performance. Log-related commands won't work if the capability is enabled. Defaults to false . |
appium:timeZone | Overrides the current device's time zone since the driver version 3.1.0. This change is preserved until the next override. The time zone identifier must be a valid name from the list of available time zone identifiers, for example Europe/Kyiv |
Element Attributes
UiAutomator2 driver supports the following element attributes:
Name | Description | Example |
---|
checkable | Whether the element is checkable or not | 'true' |
checked | Whether the element is checked. Always false if the element is not checkable | 'false' |
class or className | The full name of the element's class. Could be null for some elements | 'android.view.View' |
clickable | Whether the element could be clicked | 'false' |
content-desc or contentDescription | The content-description attribute of the accessible element | 'foo' |
enabled | Whether the element could be clicked | 'true' |
focusable | Whether the element could be focused | 'true' |
focused | Whether the element could is focused. Always false if the element is not focusable | 'false' |
long-clickable or longClickable | Whether the element accepts long clicks | 'false' |
package | Identifier of the package the element belongs to | 'com.mycompany' |
password | Whether the element is a password input field | 'true' |
resource-id or resourceId | Element's resource identifier. Could be null | 'com.mycompany:id/resId' |
scrollable | Whether the element is scrollable | 'true' |
selection-start | Contains the index of the char where the selection starts. Could be null if the element provides no range info | '5' |
selection-end | Contains the index of the char where the selection ends. Could be null if the element provides no range info | '8' |
selected | Whether the element is selected | 'false' |
text or name | The element's text. It never equals to null | 'my text' |
hint | Element's hint text. On Android versions below Oreo it always equals to null . | 'my hint text' |
bounds | The element's visible frame ([left, top][right, bottom] ) | [0,0][100,100] |
displayed | Whether the element is visible to the user | 'true' |
contentSize | The dimensions of the element's content area | {"left": 0, "top":0, "width": 100, "height": 100, "scrollableOffset": 10, "touchPadding": 0} |
extras | The result of getExtras. The value includes all key-value pairs as key=value separated by a semicolon (; ). If the value is empty, then only key part ending with the equal sign will be present. | Part of extras in chrome browser: AccessibilityNodeInfo.roleDescription=;
AccessibilityNodeInfo.chromeRole=rootWebArea; ACTION_ARGUMENT_HTML_ELEMENT_STRING_VALUES= ARTICLE,BLOCKQUOTE,BUTTON,CHECKBOX |
Element Location
UiAutomator2 driver supports the following location strategies:
Name | Description | Speed Ranking | Example |
---|
id | This strategy is mapped to the native UiAutomator's By.res locator (exact match of element's resource name). Package identifier prefix is added automatically if unset and is equal to the identifier of the current application under test. | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | 'com.mycompany:id/resourceId' |
accessibilityId | This strategy is mapped to the native UiAutomator's By.desc locator (exact match of element's content description). | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | 'my description' |
className | This strategy is mapped to the native UiAutomator's By.clazz locator (exact match of element's class). | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | 'android.view.View' |
-android uiautomator | This strategy is mapped to the native UiAutomator's UiSelector locator). It is even possible to perform some advanced operations, like scrolling, with this locator type. Check Guide on UiAutomator Locator Types | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | new UiScrollable(new UiSelector().resourceId("android:id/list")).scrollIntoView(new UiSelector().text("Radio Group")) |
xpath | For elements lookup Xpath strategy the driver uses the same XML tree that is generated by page source API. Only Xpath 1.0 is supported for appium-uiatomator2-server versions below 4.25.0. All server versions starting from 4.25.0 support both Xpath 1.0 and 2.0 | ⭐⭐⭐ | By.xpath("//android.view.View[@text="Regular" and @checkable="true"]") |
Parallel Tests
It is possible to execute tests in parallel using UiAutomator2 driver.
Appium allows to do this on per-process (multiple server processes running on different ports managing single session)
or per-request basis (single server process managing multiple sessions, more preferable, uses less resources and ensures better control over running sessions).
Note: If you are not going to run your tests in parallel then consider enabling the --session-override
Appium server argument.
It forces the server to close all pending sessions before a new one could be opened,
which allows you to avoid possible issues with such sessions silently running/expiring in the background.
Important Real Device Capabilities
udid
: The unique device id.systemPort
: Set a unique system port number for each parallel session. Otherwise you might get a port conflict such as in this issue.chromedriverPort
: The unique chromedriver port if testing web views or Chrome.mjpegServerPort
: Set a unique MJPEG server port for each parallel session if you are going to record a video.
Important Emulator Capabilities
avd
: The unique emulator name.systemPort
: Set a unique system port number for each parallel session.chromedriverPort
: The unique chromedriver port (if testing web views or Chrome).mjpegServerPort
: Set a unique MJPEG server port for each parallel session if you are going to record a video.
Settings API
UiAutomator2 driver supports Appium Settings API.
Along with the common settings the following driver-specific settings are currently available:
Name | Type | Description |
---|
actionAcknowledgmentTimeout | long | Maximum number of milliseconds to wait for an acknowledgment of generic uiautomator actions, such as clicks, text setting, and menu presses. The acknowledgment is anAccessibilityEvent corresponding to an action, that lets the framework determine if the action was successful. Generally, this timeout should not be modified. 3000 ms by default |
allowInvisibleElements | boolean | Whether to include elements that are not visible to the user (e. g. whose displayed attribute is false ) to the XML source tree. false by default |
ignoreUnimportantViews | boolean | Enables or disables layout hierarchy compression. If compression is enabled, the layout hierarchy derived from the Acessibility framework will only contain nodes that are important for uiautomator testing. Any unnecessary surrounding layout nodes that make viewing and searching the hierarchy inefficient are removed. false by default |
elementResponseAttributes | string | Comma-separated list of element attribute names to be included into findElement response. By default only element UUID is present there, but it is also possible to add the following items: name , text , rect , enabled , displayed , selected , attribute/<element_attribute_name> . It is required that shouldUseCompactResponses setting is set to false in order for this one to apply. |
enableMultiWindows | boolean | Whether to include all windows that the user can interact with (for example an on-screen keyboard) while building the XML page source (true ). By default it is false and only the single active application window is included to the page source. |
enableTopmostWindowFromActivePackage | boolean | Whether to limit the window with the highest Z-order from the active package for interactions and page source retrieval. By default it is false and the active application window, which may not necessarily have this order, is included to the page source. |
enableNotificationListener | boolean | Whether to enable (true ) toast notifications listener to listen for new toast notifications. By default this listener is enabled and UiAutomator2 server includes the text of toast messages to the generated XML page source, but not for longer than 3500 ms after the corresponding notification expires. |
keyInjectionDelay | long | Delay in milliseconds between key presses when injecting text input. 0 ms by default |
scrollAcknowledgmentTimeout | long | Timeout for waiting for an acknowledgement of an uiautomator scroll swipe action. The acknowledgment is an AccessibilityEvent, corresponding to the scroll action, that lets the framework determine if the scroll action was successful. Generally, this timeout should not be modified. 200 ms by default |
shouldUseCompactResponses | boolean | Used in combination with elementResponseAttributes setting. If set to false then the findElement response is going to include the items enumerated in elementResponseAttributes setting. true by default |
waitForIdleTimeout | long | Timeout used for waiting for the user interface to go into an idle state. By default, all core uiautomator objects except UiDevice will perform this wait before starting to search for the widget specified by the object's locator. Once the idle state is detected or the timeout elapses (whichever occurs first), the object will start to wait for the selector to find a match. Consider lowering the value of this setting if you experience long delays while interacting with accessibility elements in your test. 10000 ms by default. |
waitForSelectorTimeout | long | Timeout for waiting for a widget to become visible in the user interface so that it can be matched by a selector. Because user interface content is dynamic, sometimes a widget may not be visible immediately and won't be detected by a selector. This timeout allows the uiautomator framework to wait for a match to be found, up until the timeout elapses. This timeout is only applied to android uiautomator location strategy. 10000 ms by default |
normalizeTagNames | boolean | Being set to true applies unicode-to-ascii normalization of element class names used as tag names in the page source XML document. This is necessary if the application under test has some Unicode class names, which cannot be used as XML tag names by default due to known bugs in Android's XML DOM parser implementation. false by default |
shutdownOnPowerDisconnect | boolean | Whether to shutdown the server if the device under test is disconnected from a power source (e. g. stays on battery power). true by default. |
simpleBoundsCalculation | boolean | Whether to calculate element bounds as absolute values (true ) or check if the element is covered by other elements and thus partially hidden (false , the default behaviour). Setting this setting to true helps to improve the performance of XML page source generation, but decreases bounds preciseness. Use with care. |
trackScrollEvents | boolean | Whether to apply scroll events tracking (true , the default value), so the server could calculate the value of contentSize attribute. Having this setting enabled may add delays to all scrolling actions. |
wakeLockTimeout | long | The timeout in milliseconds of wake lock that UiAutomator2 server acquires by default to prevent the device under test going to sleep while an automated test is running. By default the server acquires the lock for 24 hours. Setting this value to zero forces the server to release the wake lock. |
serverPort | int | The number of the port on the remote device to start UiAutomator2 server on. Do not mix this with systemPort , which is acquired on the host machine. Must be in range 1024..65535. 6790 by default |
mjpegServerPort | int | The number of the port on the remote device to start MJPEG screenshots broadcaster on. Must be in range 1024..65535. 7810 by default |
mjpegServerFramerate | int | The maximum count of screenshots per second taken by the MJPEG screenshots broadcaster. Must be in range 1..60. 10 by default |
mjpegScalingFactor | int | The percentage value used to apply downscaling on the screenshots generated by the MJPEG screenshots broadcaster. Must be in range 1..100. 50 is by default, which means that screenshots are downscaled to the half of their original size keeping their original proportions. |
mjpegServerScreenshotQuality | int | The percentage value used to apply lossy JPEG compression on the screenshots generated by the MJPEG screenshots broadcaster. Must be in range 1..100. 50 is by default, which means that screenshots are compressed to the half of their original quality. |
mjpegBilinearFiltering | boolean | Controls whether (true ) or not (false , the default value) to apply bilinear filtering to MJPEG screenshots broadcaster resize algorithm. Enabling this flag may improve the quality of the resulting scaled bitmap, but may introduce a small performance hit. |
useResourcesForOrientationDetection | boolean | Defines the strategy used by UiAutomator2 server to detect the original device orientation. By default (false value) the server uses device rotation value for this purpose. Although, this approach may not work for some devices and a portrait orientation may erroneously be detected as the landscape one (and vice versa). In such case it makes sense to play with this setting. |
enforceXPath1 | boolean | Since UiAutomator2 driver version 4.25.0 XPath2 is set as the default and the recommended interpreter for the corresponding element locators. This interpreter is based on Psychopath XPath2 implementation, which is now a part of the Eclipse foundation. In most of the cases XPath1 locators are also valid XPath2 locators, so there should be no issues while locating elements. Although, since the XPath2 standard is much more advanced in comparison to the previous version, some issues are possible for more sophisticated locators, which cannot be fixed easily, as we depend on the third-party library mentioned above. Then try to workaround such issues by enforcing XPath1 usage (whose implementation is a part of the Android platform itself) and assigning this setting to true . Note, this setting is actually applied at the time when the element lookup by XPath is executed, so you could switch it on or off whenever needed throughout your automated testing session. |
limitXPathContextScope | boolean | Due to historical reasons UiAutomator2 driver limits scopes of element context-based searches to the parent element. This means a request like findElement(By.xpath, "//root").findElement(By.xpath, "./..") would always fail, because the driver only collects descendants of the root element for the destination XML source. The limitXPathContextScope setting being set to false changes that default behavior, so the collected page source includes the whole page source XML where root node is set as the search context. With that setting disabled the search query above should not fail anymore. Although, you must still be careful while building XPath requests for context-based searches with the limitXPathContextScope setting set to false . A request like findElement(By.xpath, "//root").findElement(By.xpath, "//element") would ignore the current context and search for element trough the whole page source. Use . notation to correct that behavior and only find element nodes which are descendants of the root node: findElement(By.xpath, "//root").findElement(By.xpath, ".//element") . |
disableIdLocatorAutocompletion | boolean | According to internal Android standards it is expected that each resource identifier is prefixed with <packageName>:id/ string. This should guarantee uniqueness of each identifier. Although some application development frameworks ignore this rule and don't add such prefix automatically or, rather, let it up to the developer to decide how to represent their application identifiers. For example, testTag modifier attribute in the Jetpack Compose with testTagsAsResourceId allows developers to set an arbitrary string without the prefix rule. Interoperability with UiAutomator also explains how to set it. By default UIA2 driver adds the above prefixes automatically to all resource id locators if they are not prefixed, but in case of such "special" apps this feature might be disabled by assigning the setting to true . |
includeExtrasInPageSource | boolean | Whether to include extras element attribute in the XML page source result. Then, XPath locator can find the element by the extras. Its value consists of combined getExtras as keys=value pair separated by a semicolon (; ), thus you may need to find the element with partial matching like contains e.g. driver.find_element :xpath, '//*[contains(@extras, "AccessibilityNodeInfo.roleDescription=")]' . The value could be huge if elements in the XML page source have large extras . It could affect the performance of XML page source generation. |
snapshotMaxDepth | int | The number of maximum depth for the source tree snapshot. The default value is 70 . This number should be in range [1, 500]. A part of the elements source tree might be lost if the value is too low. Also, StackOverflowError might be caused if the value is too high (Issues 12545, 12892). The available driver version is 2.27.0 or higher. |
Platform-Specific Extensions
Beside of standard W3C APIs the driver provides the below custom command extensions to execute platform specific scenarios. Use the following source code examples in order to invoke them from your client code:
var result = driver.executeScript("mobile: <methodName>", Map.ofEntries(
Map.entry("arg1", "value1"),
Map.entry("arg2", "value2")
));
const result = await driver.executeScript('mobile: <methodName>', [{
arg1: "value1",
arg2: "value2",
}]);
result = driver.execute_script('mobile: <methodName>', {
'arg1': 'value1',
'arg2': 'value2',
})
result = @driver.execute_script 'mobile: <methodName>', {
arg1: 'value1',
arg2: 'value2',
}
object result = driver.ExecuteScript("mobile: <methodName>", new Dictionary<string, object>() {
{"arg1", "value1"},
{"arg2", "value2"}
});
mobile: shell
Executes the given shell command on the device under test via ADB connection. This extension exposes a potential security risk and thus is only enabled when explicitly activated by the adb_shell
server command line feature specifier.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
command | string | yes | Shell command name to execute, for example echo or rm | echo |
args | Array<string> | no | Array of command arguments | ['-f', '/sdcard/myfile.txt'] |
timeout | number | no | Command timeout in milliseconds. If the command blocks for longer than this timeout then an exception is going to be thrown. The default timeout is 20000 ms | 100000 |
includeStderr | boolean | no | Whether to include stderr stream into the returned result. false by default | true |
Returned Result
Depending on the includeStderr
value this API could either return a string, which is equal to the stdout
stream content of the given command or a dictionary whose elements are stdout
and stderr
and values are contents of the corresponding outgoing streams. If the command exits with a non-zero return code then an exception is going to be thrown. The exception message will be equal to the command stderr.
mobile: execEmuConsoleCommand
Executes a command through emulator telnet console interface and returns its output.
The emulator_console
server feature must be enabled in order to use this method.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
command | string | yes | The actual command to execute. See Android Emulator Console Guide for more details on available commands | help-verbose |
execTimeout | number | no | Timeout used to wait for a server reply to the given command in milliseconds. 60000 ms by default | 100000 |
connTimeout | boolean | no | Console connection timeout in milliseconds. 5000 ms by default | 10000 |
initTimeout | boolean | no | Telnet console initialization timeout in milliseconds (the time between the connection happens and the command prompt). 5000 ms by default | 10000 |
Returned Result
The actual command output. An error is thrown if command execution fails.
Mobile Gesture Commands
UiAutomator2 provides several extensions that allow to automate popular mobile gesture shortcuts:
- mobile: dragGesture
- mobile: flingGesture
- mobile: doubleClickGesture
- mobile: clickGesture
- mobile: longClickGesture
- mobile: pinchCloseGesture
- mobile: pinchOpenGesture
- mobile: swipeGesture
- mobile: scrollGesture
These gestures are documented in the Automating Mobile Gestures tutorial. Check W3C Actions API and
Low-Level Insights on Android Input Events if you need to automate more complicated gestures.
mobile: scroll
Scrolls the given scrollable element until an element identified by strategy
and selector
becomes visible. This function returns immediately if the destination element is already visible in the view port. Otherwise it would scroll to the very beginning of the scrollable control and tries to reach the destination element by scrolling its parent to the end step by step. The scroll direction (vertical or horizontal) is detected automatically.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
elementId | string | no | The identifier of the scrollable element. It is required this element is a valid scrollable container and it was located by -android uiautomator strategy. If this property is not provided then the first currently available scrollable view is selected for the interaction. | 123456-3456-3435-3453453 |
strategy | string | yes | The following strategies are supported: accessibility id (UiSelector().description), class name (UiSelector().className), -android uiautomator (UiSelector) | 'accessibility id' |
selector | string | yes | The corresponding lookup value for the selected strategy. | 'com.mycompany:id/table' |
maxSwipes | number | no | The maximum number of swipes to perform on the target scrollable view in order to reach the destination element. In case this value is unset then it would be retrieved from the scrollable element itself (vua getMaxSearchSwipes() property). | 10 |
mobile: deepLink
Start URI that may take users directly to the specific content in the app. Read Reliably Opening Deep Links Across Platforms and Devices for more details.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
url | string | yes | The URL to start | theapp://login/ |
package | string | yes | The name of the package to start the URI with | 'com.mycompany' |
waitForLaunch | boolean | no | If false then ADB won't wait for the started activity to return the control. true by default | false |
mobile: startLogsBroadcast
Starts Android logcat broadcast websocket on the same host and port where Appium server is running at /ws/session/:sessionId:/appium/logcat
endpoint. The method will return immediately if the web socket is already listening. Each connected webcoket listener will receive logcat log lines as soon as they are visible to Appium. Read Using Mobile Execution Commands to Continuously Stream Device Logs with Appium for more details.
mobile: stopLogsBroadcast
Stops the previously started logcat broadcasting websocket server. This method will return immediately if no server is running. Read Using Mobile Execution Commands to Continuously Stream Device Logs with Appium for more details.
mobile: deviceidle
This is a wrapper to 'adb shell dumpsys deviceidle' interface.
Read Diving Into Android 'M' Doze for more details.
This API only exists since Android 6.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
action | whitelistAdd or whitelistRemove | yes | The name of the action to perform | whitelistAdd |
packages | string or string[] | yes | One or more package names to perfom the above action on | 'com.mycompany' |
mobile: acceptAlert
Tries to accept an Android alert. This method might not always be reliable as there is no single standard for how Android alerts should look like within the Accessibility representation.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
buttonLabel | string | no | The name/text of the alert button to click in order to accept it. If not provided then the driver will try to autodetect it | Accept |
mobile: dismissAlert
Tries to dismiss an Android alert. This method might not always be reliable as there is no single standard for how Android alerts should look like within the Accessibility representation.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
buttonLabel | string | no | The name/text of the alert button to click in order to dismiss it. If not provided then the driver will try to autodetect it | Dismiss |
mobile: batteryInfo
Retrieves the battery information from the device under test.
Returned Result
The extension returns a dictionary whose entries are:
Name | Type | Description | Example |
---|
level | number | Battery level in range [0.0, 1.0], where 1.0 means 100% charge. -1 is returned if the actual value cannot be retrieved from the system. | 0.5 |
state | number | Battery state. The following values are possible: BATTERY_STATUS_UNKNOWN = 1; BATTERY_STATUS_CHARGING = 2; BATTERY_STATUS_DISCHARGING = 3; BATTERY_STATUS_NOT_CHARGING = 4; BATTERY_STATUS_FULL = 5. -1 is returned if the actual value cannot be retrieved from the system. | 4 |
mobile: deviceInfo
Retrieves the information about the device under test, like the device model, serial number, network connectivity info, etc.
Returned Result
The extension returns a dictionary whose entries are the device properties. Check https://github.com/appium/appium-uiautomator2-server/blob/master/app/src/main/java/io/appium/uiautomator2/handler/GetDeviceInfo.java to get the full list of returned keys and their corresponding values.
mobile: getDeviceTime
Retrieves the current device's timestamp.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
format | string | no | The set of format specifiers. Read https://momentjs.com/docs/ to get the full list of supported datetime format specifiers. The default format is YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ssZ , which complies to ISO-8601 | YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ssZ |
Returned Result
The device timestamp string formatted according to the given specifiers
mobile: changePermissions
Changes package permissions in runtime.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
permissions | string or Array<string> | yes | The full name of the permission to be changed or a list of permissions. Consider checking the full list of standard Android permission names. If all magic string is passed (available since driver version 2.8.0) and target equals pm (the default value) then the chosen action is going to be applied to all permissions requested/granted by the 'appPackage'. If target is set to appops (available since v2.11.0) then check AppOpsManager.java sources to get the full list of supported appops permission names for the given Android platform. The all magic string is unsupported for the appops target. | ['android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION', 'android.permission.BROADCAST_SMS'] all ['READ_SMS', 'ACCESS_NOTIFICATIONS'] |
appPackage | string | no | The application package to set change permissions on. Defaults to the package name under test | com.mycompany.myapp |
action | string | no | Either grant (the default action) or revoke if target is set to pm , otherwise one of: allow (default), deny , ignore , default . | allow |
target | string | no | Either pm (default) or appops (available since v2.11.0). The appops one requires adb_shell server security option to be enabled | appops |
mobile: getPermissions
Gets runtime permissions list for the given application package.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
type | string | no | One of possible permission types to get. Can be one of: denied , granted or requested (the default value). | granted |
appPackage | string | no | The application package to get permissions from. Defaults to the package name under test | com.mycompany.myapp |
Returned Result
Array of strings, where each string is a permission name. the array could be empty.
mobile: performEditorAction
Performs IME action on the currently focused edit element.
Very often Android developers use onEditorAction callback with actionId
argument to implement actions handling, for example, when Search
or Done
button is pressed on the on-screen keyboard. This mobile extension is supposed to emulate the invokation of such callback on the focused element.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
action | string | yes | The name or an integer code of the editor action to be executed. The following action names are supported: normal, unspecified, none, go, search, send, next, done, previous . Read EditorInfo for more details on this topic. | search |
mobile: startScreenStreaming
Starts device screen broadcast by creating MJPEG server. Multiple calls to this method have no effect unless the previous streaming session is stopped. This method only works if the adb_screen_streaming
feature is enabled on the server side. It is also required that GStreamer with gst-plugins-base
, gst-plugins-good
and gst-plugins-bad
packages are installed and available in PATH on the server machine.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
width | number | no | The scaled width of the device's screen. If unset then the script will assign it to the actual screen width measured in pixels. | 768 |
height | number | no | The scaled height of the device's screen. If unset then the script will assign it to the actual screen height measured in pixels. | 1024 |
bitRate | number | no | The video bit rate for the video, in bits per second. The default value is 4000000 (4 Mb/s). You can increase the bit rate to improve video quality, but doing so results in larger movie files. | 1024000 |
host | string | no | The IP address/host name to start the MJPEG server on. You can set it to 0.0.0.0 to trigger the broadcast on all available network interfaces. 127.0.0.1 by default | 0.0.0.0 |
pathname | string | no | The HTTP request path the MJPEG server should be available on. If unset then any pathname on the given host /port combination will work. Note that the value should always start with a single slash: / | /myserver |
tcpPort | number | no | The port number to start the internal TCP MJPEG broadcast on. This type of broadcast always starts on the loopback interface (127.0.0.1 ). 8094 by default | 5024 |
port | number | no | The port number to start the MJPEG server on. 8093 by default | 5023 |
quality | number | no | The quality value for the streamed JPEG images. This number should be in range [1, 100], where 100 is the best quality. 70 by default | 80 |
considerRotation | boolean | no | If set to true then GStreamer pipeline will increase the dimensions of the resulting images to properly fit images in both landscape and portrait orientations. Set it to true if the device rotation is not going to be the same during the broadcasting session. false by default | false |
logPipelineDetails | boolean | no | Whether to log GStreamer pipeline events into the standard log output. Might be useful for debugging purposes. false by default | true |
mobile: stopScreenStreaming
Stop the previously started screen streaming. If no screen streaming server has been started then nothing is done.
mobile: getNotifications
Retrieves Android notifications via Appium Settings helper. Appium Settings app itself must be manually granted to access notifications under device Settings in order to make this feature working. Different vendors might require more than just the normal Notification permissions at the usual Apps menu. Try to look in places like Privacy menus if you are getting zero items retrieved while expecting some results.
Appium Settings helper keeps all the active notifications plus notifications that appeared while it was running in the internal buffer, but no more than 100 items altogether. Newly appeared notifications are always added to the head of the notifications array. The isRemoved
flag is set to true
for notifications that have been removed.
See https://developer.android.com/reference/android/service/notification/StatusBarNotification and https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Notification.html for more information on available notification properties and their values.
Returned Result
The example output is:
{
"statusBarNotifications":[
{
"isGroup":false,
"packageName":"io.appium.settings",
"isClearable":false,
"isOngoing":true,
"id":1,
"tag":null,
"notification":{
"title":null,
"bigTitle":"Appium Settings",
"text":null,
"bigText":"Keep this service running, so Appium for Android can properly interact with several system APIs",
"tickerText":null,
"subText":null,
"infoText":null,
"template":"android.app.Notification$BigTextStyle"
},
"userHandle":0,
"groupKey":"0|io.appium.settings|1|null|10133",
"overrideGroupKey":null,
"postTime":1576853518850,
"key":"0|io.appium.settings|1|null|10133",
"isRemoved":false
}
]
}
mobile: openNotifications
Opens notifications drawer on the device under test. Does nothing if the drawer is already opened. Available since driver version 2.23
mobile: listSms
Retrieves the list of the most recent SMS properties list via Appium Settings helper. Messages are sorted by date in descending order.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
max | number | no | The maximum count of recent messages to retrieve. 100 by default | 10 |
Returned Result
The example output is:
{
"items":[
{
"id":"2",
"address":"+123456789",
"person":null,
"date":"1581936422203",
"read":"0",
"status":"-1",
"type":"1",
"subject":null,
"body":"\"text message2\"",
"serviceCenter":null
},
{
"id":"1",
"address":"+123456789",
"person":null,
"date":"1581936382740",
"read":"0",
"status":"-1",
"type":"1",
"subject":null,
"body":"\"text message\"",
"serviceCenter":null
}
],
"total":2
}
mobile: type
Types the given Unicode string. It is expected that the focus is already put to the destination input field before this method is called. The main difference between this method and the sendKeys one is that it emulates true
typing like it was done from an on-screen keyboard. It also properly supports Unicode input characters.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
text | string | yes | The text to type | testing |
mobile: sensorSet
Emulate changing of sensor values on the connected emulator.
This extension does not work on real devices.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
sensorType | string | yes | The set of all supported sensor types could be found in adb-emu-commands.js (look for SENSORS object values). Check the output of sensor status command in the emulator console to see more details on the available sensor types | light |
value | string | yes | Check the output of sensor get <sensorType> command in the emulator console to see the acceptable value format for the given sensor type | 50 |
mobile: pullFile
Pulls a remote file from the device.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
remotePath | string | yes | The full path to the remote file or a specially formatted path, which points to an item inside an app bundle, for example @my.app.id/my/path . It is mandatory for the app bundle to have debugging enabled in order to use the latter remotePath format. If the file with the given name does not exist then an exception will be thrown. | /sdcard/foo.bar |
Returned Result
Base64-encoded string, which represents the content of the remote file.
mobile: pushFile
Pushes a local file to the device.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
remotePath | string | yes | The path on the device to where the payload should be written. The value format is similar to the one used in pullFile extension. If the file with the same name already exists then it will be silently overridden. | /sdcard/foo.bar |
payload | string | yes | Base64-encoded content of the file to be pushed. | QXBwaXVt |
mobile: pullFolder
Pulls a remote folder from the device.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
remotePath | string | yes | Same as for pullFile extension, but should be pointing to a remote folder | /sdcard/yolo/ |
Returned Result
Base64-encoded string, which represents the zipped content of the remote folder.
mobile: deleteFile
Deletes a file on the remote device.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
remotePath | string | yes | The full path to the remote file or a file inside an application bundle | /sdcard/myfile.txt or @my.app.id/path/in/bundle |
mobile: isAppInstalled
Verify whether an application is installed on the device under test.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
appId | string | yes | The identifier of the application package to be checked | my.app.id |
user | number or string | no | The user ID for which the package is installed.. The current user is used by default | 1006 |
Returned Result
True or false
mobile: queryAppState
Queries the current state of the app.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
appId | string | yes | The identifier of the application package to be checked | my.app.id |
Returned Result
The following numbers could returned:
- The app is not installed:
0
- The app is installed and is not running:
1
- The app is running in background:
3
- The app is running in foreground:
4
mobile: activateApp
Activates the given application or launches it if necessary.
The action literally simulates
clicking the corresponding application icon on the dashboard.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
appId | string | yes | The identifier of the application package to be activated | my.app.id |
mobile: removeApp
Remove the corresponding application if is installed.
The call is ignored if the app is not installed.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
appId | string | yes | The identifier of the application package to be removed | my.app.id |
timeout | number | no | The count of milliseconds to wait until the app is terminated. 20000ms by default. | 1500, 0 |
keepData | boolean | no | Set to true in order to keep the application data and cache folders after uninstall. | true |
Returned Result
True is the app has been found on the device and successfully removed. Otherwise false.
mobile: terminateApp
Terminates the app and waits until the app is terminated up to the given timeout
by checking the app state to ensure if the app process is actually stopped.
The app state check can be skipped if the given timeout is lower or equal to zero since UIAutomator driver 2.9.0.
The skip helps when you want to terminate the app process but do not want to check the process existence
because the app under test may, for example, restart it automatically.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
appId | string | yes | The identifier of the application package to be terminated | my.app.id |
timeout | number | no | The count of milliseconds to wait until the app is terminated. 500ms by default. | 1500, 0 |
Returned Result
True if the app has been successfully terminated.
mobile: installApp
Installs the given application package to the device under test.
It might raise the INSTALL_FAILED_VERSION_DOWNGRADE
error if the installation was a version downgrade.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
appPath | string | yes | The local .apk(s) path on the server filesystem or a remote url. | /app/path.apk |
timeout | number | no | The count of milliseconds to wait until the app is installed.. 6000ms by default. | 120000 |
allowTestPackages | boolean | no | Set to true in order to allow test packages installation. false by default | true |
useSdcard | boolean | no | Set to true to install the app on sdcard instead of the device memory. false by default | true |
grantPermissions | boolean | no | Set to true in order to grant all the permissions requested in the application's manifest automatically after the installation is completed under Android 6+. The targetSdkVersion in the application manifest must be greater or equal to 23 and the Android version on the device under test must be greater or equal to Android 6 (API level 23) to grant permissions. Applications whose targetSdkVersion is lower than or equal to 22 must be reisntalled to grant permissions for Android 6+ devices. false by default | true |
replace | boolean | no | Set it to false if you don't want the application to be upgraded/reinstalled if it is already present on the device, but throw an error instead. true by default | false |
checkVersion | boolean | no | Set to true, in order to skip the application installation if the device under test has a greater or equal to the application version. It may help to avoid INSTALL_FAILED_VERSION_DOWNGRADE error and unnecessary installation. | true |
mobile: clearApp
Deletes all data associated with a package. Calls adb shell pm clear
under the hood.
The app should be accessible, should not be running,
and should exist on the device under test for this extension to work properly.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
appId | string | yes | The identifier of the application package to be cleared | my.app.id |
Returned Result
Stdout of the corresponding adb command.
mobile: startActivity
Starts the given activity intent. Invokes am start
/am start-activity
command under the hood.
This method extends the functionality of the Start Activity app management API.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
intent | string | yes | The full name of the activity intent to start | com.some.package.name/.YourActivityClassName |
user | number or string | no | The user ID for which the service is started. The current user is used by default | 1006 |
wait | boolean | no | Set it to true if you want to block the method call until the Activity Manager's process returns the control to the system. | false |
stop | boolean | no | Set it to true to force stop the target app before starting the activity. | false |
windowingMode | integer | no | The windowing mode to launch the activity into. Check WindowConfiguration.java for more details on possible windowing modes (constants starting with WINDOWING_MODE_ ). | 1 |
activityType | integer | no | The activity type to launch the activity as. Check WindowConfiguration.java for more details on possible activity types (constants starting with ACTIVITY_TYPE_ ). | 1 |
action | string | no | Action name. The actual value for the Activity Manager's -a argument. | android.intent.action.MAIN |
uri | string | no | Unified resource identifier. The actual value for the Activity Manager's -d argument. | https://appium.io |
mimeType | string | no | Mime type. The actual value for the Activity Manager's -t argument. | application/json |
identifier | string | no | Optional identifier. The actual value for the Activity Manager's -i argument. | my_identifier |
categories | string or Array<string> | no | One or more category names. The actual value(s) for the Activity Manager's -c argument. | android.intent.category.LAUNCHER |
component | string | no | Component name. The actual value for the Activity Manager's -n argument. | com.myapp/com.myapp.SplashActivity |
package | string | no | Package name. The actual value for the Activity Manager's -p argument. | com.myapp |
extras | Array<Array<string>> | no | Optional intent arguments. Must be represented as an array of arrays, where each subarray item contains two (only in case it no value is required for the given type) or three string items: value type, key (variable name) and the value itself. Supported value types are: s : string. Value must be a valid string; sn : null. Value is ignored for this type; z : boolean. Value must be either true or false ; i : integer. Value must be a valid 4-byte integer number; l : long. Value must be a valid 8-byte long number; f : float: Value must be a valid float number; u : uri. Value must be a valid uniform resource identifier string; cn : component name. Value must be a valid component name string; ia : Integer[]. Value must be a string of comma-separated integers; ial : List<Integer>. Value must be a string of comma-separated integers; la : Long[]. Value must be a string of comma-separated long numbers; lal : List<Long>. Value must be a string of comma-separated long numbers; fa : Float[]. Value must be a string of comma-separated float numbers; fal : List<Float>. Value must be a string of comma-separated float numbers; sa : String[]. Value must be comma-separated strings. To embed a comma into a string escape it using ","; sal : List<String>. Value must be comma-separated strings. To embed a comma into a string, escape it using "," | [['s', 'varName1', 'My String1'], ['s', 'varName2', 'My String2'], ['ia', 'arrName', '1,2,3,4']] |
flags | string | no | Intent startup-specific flags as a hexadecimal string. Check Intent documentation for the list of available flag values (constants starting with FLAG_ACTIVITY_ ). Flag values could be merged using the logical 'or' operation. | 0x10200000 is the combination of two flags: 0x10000000 FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK ` |
Returned Result
The actual stdout of the downstream am
command.
mobile: startService
Starts the given service intent. Invokes am startservice
or am start-service
command under the hood.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
intent | string | no | The full name of the service intent to start | com.some.package.name/.YourServiceSubClassName |
user | number or string | no | The user ID for which the service is started. The current user id is used by default | 1006 |
foreground | boolean | no | Set it to true if your service must be started as a foreground service. The argument only works for Android 8 and above. | false |
action | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | android.intent.action.MAIN |
uri | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | https://appium.io |
mimeType | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | application/json |
identifier | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | my_identifier |
categories | string or Array<string> | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | com.myapp/com.myapp.SplashActivity |
component | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | android.intent.category.LAUNCHER |
package | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | com.myapp |
extras | Array<Array<string>> | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | [['s', 'varName1', 'My String1'], ['s', 'varName2', 'My String2'], ['ia', 'arrName', '1,2,3,4']] |
flags | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | 0x10200000 is the combination of two flags: 0x10000000 FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK ` |
Returned Result
The actual stdout of the downstream am
command.
mobile: stopService
Stops the given service intent. Invokes am stopservice
or am stop-service
command under the hood.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
intent | string | no | The full name of the service intent to stop | com.some.package.name/.YourServiceSubClassName |
user | number or string | no | The user ID for which the service is started. The current user id is used by default | 1006 |
action | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | android.intent.action.MAIN |
uri | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | https://appium.io |
mimeType | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | application/json |
identifier | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | my_identifier |
categories | string or Array<string> | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | com.myapp/com.myapp.SplashActivity |
component | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | android.intent.category.LAUNCHER |
package | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | com.myapp |
extras | Array<Array<string>> | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | [['s', 'varName1', 'My String1'], ['s', 'varName2', 'My String2'], ['ia', 'arrName', '1,2,3,4']] |
flags | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | 0x10200000 is the combination of two flags: 0x10000000 FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK ` |
mobile: broadcast
Send a broadcast Intent. Invokes am broadcast
command under the hood.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
intent | string | no | The full name of the intent to broadcast | com.some.package.name/.YourIntentClassName |
user | number or string | no | Specify which user to send to; if not specified then send to all users. Possible values are all /current /<numeric user id> | current |
receiverPermission | string | no | Require receiver to hold the given permission | android.permission.READ_PROFILE |
allowBackgroundActivityStarts | boolean | no | The receiver may start activities even if in the background if set to true | false |
action | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | android.intent.action.MAIN |
uri | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | https://appium.io |
mimeType | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | application/json |
identifier | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | my_identifier |
categories | string or Array<string> | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | com.myapp/com.myapp.SplashActivity |
component | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | android.intent.category.LAUNCHER |
package | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | com.myapp |
extras | Array<Array<string>> | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | [['s', 'varName1', 'My String1'], ['s', 'varName2', 'My String2'], ['ia', 'arrName', '1,2,3,4']] |
flags | string | no | See the documentation for startActivity extension | 0x10200000 is the combination of two flags: 0x10000000 FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK ` |
Returned Result
The actual stdout of the downstream am
command.
mobile: getContexts
Retrieves a WebViews mapping based on CDP endpoints
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
waitForWebviewMs | number | no | Tells UiAutomator2 driver for how long (in milliseconds) to wait for web view(s) to appear since UiAutomator2 driver v2.53.0. If a Chrome process running on the device under test fails to create a connection to the devtools socket, then the chromedriver will rise an error similar to failed to connect to socket 'localabstract:chrome_devtools_remote' in UiAutomator2 driver. It could cause no WebViews found result, although a couple of retrials may fix it. This argument helps to keep trying to get WebView(s) up to the given time milliseconds as one command call. This issue tends to occur Chrome v115 and over so far. issues#19251 contains more details. If set to 0 ms (the default value), then UiAutomator2 driver only checks the WebView(s) availability once. | 10000 |
Returned Result
The following json demonstrates the example of WebviewsMapping object.
Note that description
in page
can be an empty string most likely when it comes to Mobile Chrome)
{
"proc": "@webview_devtools_remote_22138",
"webview": "WEBVIEW_22138",
"info": {
"Android-Package": "io.appium.settings",
"Browser": "Chrome/74.0.3729.185",
"Protocol-Version": "1.3",
"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; Android SDK built for x86 Build/QSR1.190920.001; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/74.0.3729.185 Mobile Safari/537.36",
"V8-Version": "7.4.288.28",
"WebKit-Version": "537.36 (@22955682f94ce09336197bfb8dffea991fa32f0d)",
"webSocketDebuggerUrl": "ws://127.0.0.1:10900/devtools/browser"
},
"pages": [
{
"description": "{\"attached\":true,\"empty\":false,\"height\":1458,\"screenX\":0,\"screenY\":336,\"visible\":true,\"width\":1080}",
"devtoolsFrontendUrl": "http://chrome-devtools-frontend.appspot.com/serve_rev/@22955682f94ce09336197bfb8dffea991fa32f0d/inspector.html?ws=127.0.0.1:10900/devtools/page/27325CC50B600D31B233F45E09487B1F",
"id": "27325CC50B600D31B233F45E09487B1F",
"title": "Releases · appium/appium · GitHub",
"type": "page",
"url": "https://github.com/appium/appium/releases",
"webSocketDebuggerUrl": "ws://127.0.0.1:10900/devtools/page/27325CC50B600D31B233F45E09487B1F"
}
],
"webviewName": "WEBVIEW_com.io.appium.setting"
}
mobile: installMultipleApks
Install applications via install-multiple
option.
Please read more details in the corresponding section of the adb --help
command output.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
apks | Array<string> | yes | The path to APKs. Each path should be the full path to the apk to be installed, or an URL to a remote location. | ['/path/to/local.apk', 'https://github.com/appium/ruby_lib_core/blob/master/test/functional/app/api.apk.zip?raw=true'] |
options | object | no | Installation options. If you want enable -g option, you could specify that {grantPermissions: true} . allowTestPackages corresponds -t , useSdcard corresponds -s , replace corresponds -r (-r is enabled by default), partialInstall corresponds -p . | {grantPermissions: true, partialInstall: true} |
mobile: lock
Lock the device (and optionally unlock it after a certain amount of time). Only simple (e.g. without a password) locks are supported.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
seconds | number | string | no | The number of seconds after which to unlock the device. Set to 0 or leave it empty to require manual unlock (e.g. do not block and automatically unlock afterwards). |
mobile: unlock
Unlocks the device if it is locked. Noop if the device's screen is not locked.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
key | string | yes | The unlock key. See the documentation on appium:unlockKey capability for more details | 12345 |
type | string | yes | The unlock type. See the documentation on appium:unlockType capability for more details | password |
strategy | string | no | Unlock strategy. See the documentation on appium:unlockStrategy capability for more details | uiautomator |
timeoutMs | number | no | Unlock timeout. See the documentation on appium:unlockSuccessTimeout capability for more details | 5000 |
mobile: isLocked
Determine whether the device is locked.
Returned Result
Either true
or false
mobile: refreshGpsCache
Sends a request to refresh the GPS cache on the device under test.
By default the location tracking is configured for
low battery consumption,
so you might need to call this extension periodically to get the updated geo
location if the actual (or mocked) device location is changed too frequently.
The feature only works if the device under test has Google Play Services installed.
In case the vanilla
LocationManager
is used the device API level must be at version 30 (Android R) or higher.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
timeoutMs | number | no | The maximum number of milliseconds to block until GPS cache is refreshed. If the API call does not receive a confirmation about successful cache refresh within this timeout then an error is thrown. Providing zero or a negative value to it skips waiting completely and does not check for any errors. 20000 ms by default. | 60000 |
mobile: startMediaProjectionRecording
Starts a new recording of the device activity using Media Projection API. This API is available since Android 10 (API level 29) and allows to record device screen and audio in high quality. Video and audio encoding is done by Android itself.
The recording is done by Appium Settings helper.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
resolution | string | no | The resolution of the resulting video, which usually equals to Full HD 1920x1080 on most phones, however you could change it to one of the following supported resolutions: "1920x1080", "1280x720", "720x480", "320x240", "176x144" | 1280x720 |
maxDurationSec | number | no | The maximum number of seconds allowed for the recording to run. 900 seconds by default (15 minutes) | 300 |
priority | string | no | Recording thread priority is set to maximum (high ) by default. However if you face performance drops during testing with recording enabled, you could reduce the recording priority to normal or low . | low |
filename | string | no | You can type recording video file name as you want, but recording currently supports only "mp4" format so your filename must end with ".mp4". An invalid file name will fail to start the recording. If not provided then the current timestamp will be used as file name. | screen.mp4 |
Returned Result
true
if a new recording has successfully started. false
if another recording is currently running.
mobile: isMediaProjectionRecordingRunning
Check if a media projection recording is currently running
Returned Result
true
if a recording is running.
mobile: stopMediaProjectionRecording
Stops a recording and retrieves the recently recorded media. If no recording has been started before then an error is thrown. If the recording has been already finished before this API has been called then the most recent recorded media is returned.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
remotePath | string | no | The path to the remote location, where the resulting video should be uploaded. The following protocols are supported: http/https, ftp. Null or empty string value (the default setting) means the content of resulting file should be encoded as Base64 and passed as the endpoont response value. An exception will be thrown if the generated media file is too big to fit into the available process memory. | https://myserver.com/upload |
user | string | no | The name of the user for the remote authentication. | admin |
pass | string | no | The password for the remote authentication. | pa$$w0rd |
method | string | no | The http multipart upload method name. The 'PUT' one is used by default. | POST |
headers | Map<string, string> | no | Additional headers mapping for multipart http(s) uploads | {'Agent': '007'} |
fileFieldName | string | no | The name of the form field, where the file content BLOB should be stored for http(s) uploads. file by default | blob |
formFields | Map<string, string> or Array<Pair> | no | Additional form fields for multipart http(s) uploads. | {'name': 'yolo.mp4'} |
uploadTimeout | number | no | The maximum number of milliseconds to wait until the media file is uploaded to the remote location. 240000 ms by default. | 30000 |
Returned Result
Base64-encoded content of the recorded media file if remotePath
argument is falsy or an empty string.
mobile: getConnectivity
Returns connectivity states for different services
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
services | string or string[] | no | One or more services to get the connectivity for. Supported service names are: wifi, data, airplaneMode. If no service names are provided then all supported names are assumed by default. | [wifi, data] |
Returned Result
A map is returned containing the following possible items (depending on which values have been passed to services
argument):
Name | Type | Description |
---|
wifi | boolean | True if wifi is enabled |
data | boolean | True if mobile data connection is enabled |
airplaneMode | boolean | True if Airplane Mode is enabled |
mobile: setConnectivity
Set the connectivity state for different services. At least one valid service name must be provided in arguments.
Missing values tell the driver to not change the corresponding service's state.
Note
Switching Wi-Fi and mobile data states reliably work on emulators for all Android versions.
Real devices support proper state switching only since Android 11.
Note
UiAutomator2 REST server app is running on the device under test and might be terminated/disconnected by Android
thus failing the driver session as a result of using this API. The only way to restore the session would be to quit it
after the network state is changed and then reopen it with noReset
capability being set to true
when the connectivity
is restored.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
wifi | booolean | no | Either to enable or disable Wi-Fi. | false |
data | booolean | no | Either to enable or disable mobile data. | false |
airplaneMode | booolean | no | Either to enable or disable Airplane Mode. | false |
mobile: getAppStrings
Retrieves string resources for the given app language. An error is thrown if strings cannot be fetched or no strings exist
for the given language abbreviation. Available since driver version 2.15.0
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
language | string | no | The language abbreviation to fetch app strings mapping for. If no language is provided then strings for the default language on the device under test would be returned | fr |
Returned Result
App strings map, where keys are resource identifiers.
mobile: hideKeyboard
Tries to hide the on-screen keyboard. Throws an exception if the keyboard cannot be hidden.
Does nothing if the keyboard is already hidden.
Returned Result
true
if the keyboard was successfully hidden or false
if it was already invisible.
mobile: isKeyboardShown
Checks if the system on-screen keyboard is visible.
Returned Result
true
if the keyboard is visible
mobile: pressKey
Emulates single key press on the key with the given code. Available since driver version 2.17.0
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
keycode | number | yes | A valid Android key code. See KeyEvent documentation for the list of available key codes | 0x00000099 (which is KEYCODE_NUMPAD_9) |
metastate | number | no | An integer in which each bit set to 1 represents a pressed meta key. See KeyEvent documentation for more details. | 0x00000010 (which is META_ALT_LEFT_ON) |
flags | number | no | Flags for the particular key event. See KeyEvent documentation for more details. | 0x00000001 (which is FLAG_WOKE_HERE) |
isLongPress | boolean | no | Whether to emulate long key press. false by default. | true |
mobile: backgroundApp
Puts the app to the background and waits the given number of seconds. Then restores the app
if necessary. The call is blocking. Available since driver version 2.19.0
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
seconds | number | no | The amount of seconds to wait between putting the app to background and restoring it. Any negative value means to not restore the app after putting it to background (the default behavior). | 5 |
mobile: getCurrentActivity
Returns the name of the currently focused app activity. Available since driver version 2.20
Returned Result
The activity class name. Could be null
mobile: getCurrentPackage
Returns the name of the currently focused app package identifier. Available since driver version 2.20
Returned Result
The package class name. Could be null
mobile: getDisplayDensity
Returns the display density value measured in DPI. Available since driver version 2.21
Returned Result
The actual DPI value as integer number
mobile: getSystemBars
Returns properties of various system bars. Available since driver version 2.21
Returned Result
A dictionary whose entries are:
Values are dictionaries with the following properties:
visible
: Whether the bar is visible (equals to false
if the bar is not present in the system info output)x
: Bar x coordinate (might be zero if the bar is not present in the system info output)y
: Bar y coordinate (might be zero if the bar is not present in the system info output)width
: Bar width (might be zero if the bar is not present in the system info output)height
: Bar height (might be zero if the bar is not present in the system info output)
mobile: fingerprint
Emulate fingerprint on Android Emulator. Only works on API 23+. Available since driver version 2.22
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
fingerprintId | number | yes | The value is the id for the finger that was "scanned". It is a unique integer that you assign for each virtual fingerprint. When the app is running you can run this same command each time the emulator prompts you for a fingerprint, you can run the adb command and pass it the fingerprintId to simulate the fingerprint scan. | 1 |
mobile: sendSms
Emulate sending an SMS to the given phone number. Only works on emulators. Available since driver version 2.22
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
phoneNumber | string | yes | The phone number to send SMS to | 0123456789 |
message | string | yes | The SMS message payload | Hello |
mobile: gsmCall
Emulate a GSM call to the given phone number. Only works on emulators. Available since driver version 2.22
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
phoneNumber | string | yes | The phone number to call to | 0123456789 |
action | call or accept or cancel or hold | yes | One of possible actions to take | accept |
mobile: gsmSignal
Emulate GSM signal strength change event. Only works on emulators. Available since driver version 2.22
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
strength | 0 or 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 | yes | One of possible signal strength values, where 4 is the best signal. | 3 |
mobile: gsmVoice
Emulate GSM voice state change event. Only works on emulators. Available since driver version 2.22
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
state | on or off or denied or searching or roaming or home or unregistered | yes | Voice state | off |
mobile: powerAC
Emulate AC power state change. Only works on emulators. Available since driver version 2.22
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
state | on or off | yes | AC Power state | off |
mobile: powerCapacity
Emulate power capacity change. Only works on emulators. Available since driver version 2.22
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
percent | 0 to 100 | yes | Percentage value in range [0, 100] | 50 |
mobile: networkSpeed
Emulate different network connection speed modes. Only works on emulators. Available since driver version 2.22
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
speed | gsm or scsd or gprs or edge or umts or hsdpa or lte or evdo or full | yes | Mobile network speed mode name | edge |
mobile: replaceElementValue
Sends a text to the given element by replacing its previous content. Available since driver version 2.22
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
elementId | string | yes | Hexadecimal identifier of the destination text input | 123456-3456-3435-3453453 |
text | string | yes | The text to enter. It could also contain Unicode characters. If the text ends with \\n (the backslash must be escaped, so the char is NOT translated into 0x0A ) then the Enter key press is going to be emulated after it is entered (the \\n substring itself will be cut off from the typed text). | yolo |
mobile: toggleGps
Switches GPS setting state. This API only works reliably since Android 12 (API 31). Available since driver version 2.23
mobile: isGpsEnabled
Returns true
if GPS is enabled on the device under test. Available since driver version 2.23
mobile: getPerformanceDataTypes
Fetches the list of supported performance data types that could be used as dataType
argument value to mobile: getPerformanceData extension. Available since driver version 2.24
Returned Result
List of strings, where each item is data type name.
mobile: getPerformanceData
Retrieves performance data about the given Android subsystem. The data is parsed from the output of the dumpsys utility. Available since driver version 2.24
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
packageName | string | yes | The name of the package identifier to fetch the data for | com.myapp |
dataType | string | yes | One of supported subsystem names. The full list of supported values is returned by mobile: getPerformanceDataTypes extension. | batteryinfo or cpuinfo or memoryinfo or networkinfo |
Returned Result
The output depends on the selected subsystem. It is organized into a table, where the first row represents column names and the following rows represent the sampled data for each column.
Example output for different data types:
[
[power],
[23]
]
[
[totalPrivateDirty, nativePrivateDirty, dalvikPrivateDirty, eglPrivateDirty, glPrivateDirty, totalPss, nativePss, dalvikPss, eglPss, glPss, nativeHeapAllocatedSize, nativeHeapSize],
[18360, 8296, 6132, null, null, 42588, 8406, 7024, null, null, 26519, 10344]
]
// emulator
[
[bucketStart, activeTime, rxBytes, rxPackets, txBytes, txPackets, operations, bucketDuration],
[1478091600000, null, 1099075, 610947, 928, 114362, 769, 0, 3600000],
[1478095200000, null, 1306300, 405997, 509, 46359, 370, 0, 3600000]
]
// real devices
[
[st, activeTime, rb, rp, tb, tp, op, bucketDuration],
[1478088000, null, null, 32115296, 34291, 2956805, 25705, 0, 3600],
[1478091600, null, null, 2714683, 11821, 1420564, 12650, 0, 3600],
[1478095200, null, null, 10079213, 19962, 2487705, 20015, 0, 3600],
[1478098800, null, null, 4444433, 10227, 1430356, 10493, 0, 3600]
]
[
[user, kernel],
[0.9, 1.3]
]
mobile: statusBar
Performs commands on the system status bar. A thin wrapper over adb shell cmd statusbar
CLI. Works on Android 8 (Oreo) and newer. Available since driver version 2.25
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
command | string | yes | One of supported status bar commands. | expandNotifications |
component | string | no | The name of the tile component. It is only required for (add|remove|click)Tile commands. | com.package.name/.service.QuickSettingsTileComponent |
Status Bar Commands
- expandNotifications: Open the notifications panel.
- expandSettings: Open the notifications panel and expand quick settings if present.
- collapse: Collapse the notifications and settings panel.
- addTile: Add a TileService of the specified component.
- removeTile: Remove a TileService of the specified component.
- clickTile: Click on a TileService of the specified component.
- getStatusIcons: Returns the list of status bar icons and the order they appear in. Each list item is separated with a new line character.
Returned Result
The actual downstream command output. It depends on the selected command and might be empty.
mobile: scheduleAction
mobile: unscheduleAction
mobile: getActionHistory
These extensions allow to deal with short-living UI elements. Read the documentation on Scheduled Actions for more details and code examples.
mobile: screenshots
Retrieves a screenshot of each display available to Android.
This functionality is only supported since Android 10.
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
displayId | number or string | no | Display identifier to take a screenshot for. If not provided then all display screenshots are going to be returned. If no matches were found then an error is thrown. Actual display identifiers could be retrived from the adb shell dumpsys SurfaceFlinger --display-id command output. | 1 |
Returns
A dictionary where each key is the display identifier and the value has the following keys:
id
: The same display identifiername
: Display nameisDefault
: Whether this display is the default onepayload
: The actual PNG screenshot data encoded to base64 string
mobile: setUiMode
Set the device UI appearance. A thin wrapper over adb shell cmd uimode
CLI.
Works on Android 10 and newer. Available since driver version 2.34
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
mode | string | yes | One of the supported UI mode names: night or car . | night |
value | string | yes | The actual mode value to set. Supported values for different UI modes are: night : yes,no,auto,custom_schedule,custom_bedtime, car : yes,no. For example, to switch the device UI to the dark mode you should set mode to night and value to yes , or to no in order to switch back to the light mode. | yes |
mobile: getUiMode
Gets the device UI appearance for the given mode. A thin wrapper over adb shell cmd uimode
CLI. Works on Android 10 and newer. Available since driver version 2.34
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
mode | string | yes | One of the supported UI mode names: night or car . | night |
Returned Result
The actual mode value. Supported values for different UI modes are:
night
: yes,no,auto,custom_schedule,custom_bedtimecar
: yes,no
mobile: sendTrimMemory
Simulates the onTrimMemory() event for the given package, which allows to verify the app functinality under different RAM-related circumstances.
Read Manage your app's memory for more details.
Available since driver version 2.41
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
pkg | string | yes | The package name to send the trimMemory event to. | com.my.company |
level | 'COMPLETE' or 'MODERATE' or 'BACKGROUND' or 'UI_HIDDEN' or 'RUNNING_CRITICAL' or 'RUNNING_LOW' or 'RUNNING_MODERATE' | yes | The actual memory trim level to simulate | RUNNING_CRITICAL |
mobile: injectEmulatorCameraImage
Simulates an image injection into the VirtualScene emulator camera background.
This feature only works on Android emulators.
It might be necessary to restart the camera client app after calling this extension
for the first time as it modifies global emulator's virtual scene settings.
All the further calls should seamlessly change the foreground picture to the supplied one.
This extension could, for example, be useful if you need to verify QR codes scanning
by the application under test.
Available since driver version 3.2.0
Arguments
Name | Type | Required | Description | Example |
---|
payload | string | yes | A valid base64-encoded .PNG image payload. Other image formats are not supported. This image will be shown on the virtual scene foreground as soon as you open a camera client app. | iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUh... |
Applications Management
UiAutomator2 driver supports Appium endpoints for applications management:
Refer to the corresponding Appium client tutorial to find out the names of the corresponding wrappers for these APIs.
Useful links:
Files Management
UiAutomator2 driver supports Appium endpoints for files management:
Refer to the corresponding Appium client tutorial to find out the names of the corresponding wrappers for these APIs.
Useful links:
Clipboard Management
UiAutomator2 driver supports Appium endpoints for clipboard management:
- Set clipboard content (
POST /appium/device/set_clipboard'
) - Get clipboard content (
POST /appium/device/get_clipboard
)
Useful links:
Hybrid Mode
UIA2 driver supports automation of web pages opened in mobile Chrome or Chromium, and
hybrid apps that use Chrome-based web views, by managing a
Chromedriver instance and
proxying commands to it when necessary.
The following endpoints are used to control the current context:
- POST
/session/:sessionId/context
: To set the current context. The body contains a single mandatory name
parameter, which has the name of the context to be set. The name of the default context is NATIVE_APP
. - GET
/session/:sessionId/context
: To retrieve the name of the current context - GET
/session/:sessionId/contexts
: To retrieve the list of available context names - mobile: getContexts
By default, the driver starts in the native context, which means that most of REST API commands are being
forwarded to the downstream appium-uiautomator2-server.
This server is running on the device under test, and trasforms API commands to appropriate low-level UiAutomator framework calls. There is always only one native context, although multiple web contexts are possible.
Each web context could contain zero or more pages/windows. It is possible to start UIA2 driver session in web context by default by setting the browserName
capability value or by enabling the appium:autoWebview
capability.
Web context(s) could be detected if a browser or a web view is active on the device. If a context is switched to
a web one then UIA2 driver spins up a Chromedriver instance for it and forwards most of the commands
to that Chromedriver instance. Note that web views must be properly configured and
debuggable in order to connect to them or get their names in the list of available contexts.
The availability of a particular web view could be easily verified by using
Chrome Remote Debugger.
You could switch between different contexts (and windows in them) at any time during the session.
The appium-chromedriver package bundled with UIA2 always
tries to download the most recent version of Chromedriver known to it. Google requires that the used Chromedriver version must always match to the version of the browser or a web view engine being automated. If these versions do not match then Chromedriver fails its creation, and context switch API shows a failure message
similar to:
An unknown server-side error occurred while processing the command.
Original error: unknown error: Chrome version must be >= 55.0.2883.0
To work around this issue it is necessary to provide UIA2 driver with a proper Chromedriver binary
that matches to the Chrome engine version running on the device under test.
Read the Chromedriver/Chrome compatibility topic below to
know more about finding a matching Chromedriver executable.
There are several ways to provide a customized Chromedriver to UIA2 driver:
When installing the driver
Specify the Chromedriver version in the CHROMEDRIVER_VERSION
environment variable:
CHROMEDRIVER_VERSION=2.20 appium install driver uiautomator2
When starting a session (manual discovery)
Chromedriver version can be specified in session capabilities, by providing the
appium:chromedriverExecutable
capability,
containing the full path to a matching Chromedriver executable, which must be manually
downloaded and put to the server file system.
When starting a session (automated discovery)
UIA2 driver could also try to detect the version of the target Chrome engine and
download matching chromedriver for it automatically if it does not exist on the local file system.
Read the Automatic discovery of compatible Chromedriver
topic below for more details.
Chromedriver/Chrome Compatibility
Since version 2.46 Google has changed their rules for Chromedriver versioning, so now the major Chromedriver version corresponds to the major web view/browser version, that it can automate. Follow the Version Selection document in order to manually find the Chromedriver, that supports your current browser/web view if its major version is equal or above 73.
To find the minimum supported browsers for older Chromedriver versions (below 73), get the
Chromium
source code,
check out the release commit, and check the variable kMinimumSupportedChromeVersion
in the file src/chrome/test/chromedriver/chrome/version.cc
. (To find the
release commits, you could use git log --pretty=format:'%h | %s%d' | grep -i "Release Chromedriver version"
.)
The complete list of available Chromedriver releases and release notes is located at Chromedriver Storage.
The list of Chromedriver versions and their matching minimum
Chrome versions known to appium-chromedriver package is stored at
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/appium/appium-chromedriver/master/config/mapping.json
Automatic Discovery of Compatible Chromedriver
UIA2 driver is able to pick the correct Chromedriver for the
version of Chrome/web view under test. While appium-chromedriver only comes bundled with the Chromedriver
most recently released at the time of the corresponding package version's release, more Chromedriver
versions could be downloaded and placed into a custom location indicated to UIA2 driver via the appium:chromedriverExecutableDir
capability.
A custom mapping of Chromedrivers to the minimum
Chrome/web view version they support could be given to UIA2 driver through the
appium:chromedriverChromeMappingFile
capability. This should be the
absolute path to a file with the mapping
in it. The contents of the file needs to be parsable as a JSON object, like:
{
"2.42": "63.0.3239",
"2.41": "62.0.3202"
}
There is a possibility to automatically download the necessary chromedriver(s) into appium:chromedriverExecutableDir
from the official Google storage. The script will automatically search for the newest chromedriver version that supports the given browser/web view, download it (the hash sum is verified as well for the downloaded archive) and add to the appium:chromedriverChromeMappingFile
mapping. Everything, which is needed to be done from your side is to execute the server with chromedriver_autodownload
feature enabled (like appium server --allow-insecure chromedriver_autodownload
).
Troubleshooting Chromedriver Download Issues
When UIA2 driver is installed it automatically downloads Chromedriver, so there is a possibility
of network or other issues leading to an installation failure.
By default, Chromedriver is retrieved from https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/
.
To use a mirror of the above URL change the value of CHROMEDRIVER_CDNURL
environemnt variable:
CHROMEDRIVER_CDNURL=https://npmmirror.com/mirrors/chromedriver appium driver install uiautomator2
It may also be necessary to adjust network proxy and firewall settings for the above to work.
In case you would like skip the download of Chromedriver entirely, do it by
defining the APPIUM_SKIP_CHROMEDRIVER_INSTALL
environment variable:
APPIUM_SKIP_CHROMEDRIVER_INSTALL=1 appium driver install uiautomator2
W3C Support in Web Context
Chromedriver did not follow the W3C standard until version 75. If you encounter proxy command error like this issue, please update your Chromedriver version.
Old Android devices can't use newer Chromedriver versions. You could avoid the error if you enforce
Mobile JSON Wire Protocol for Chromedriver. This could be done by providing {'w3c': False}
item
to appium:chromeOptions
capability value.
Since major version 75 W3C mode is the default one for Chromedriver, although it could be still switched to JSONWP one as described above (keep in mind that eventually Chromedriver will drop the support of
JSON Wire protocol completely).
The history of W3C support in Chromedriver is available for reading at
downloads section.
Troubleshooting
Activity Startup
If you experience issues with application activities being not found or not starting then consider checking How To Troubleshoot Activities Startup article.
Poor Elements Interaction Performance
If you observe automated tests need at least 10 seconds or more to locate/interact with a single element then consider changing the default value for waitForIdleTimeout setting. By default, UiAutomator framework (and all other Accessibility-based frameworks) always waits for the accessibility event stream to become idle before interacting with it (the default timeout there is 10000ms). This is needed to make sure all animations/transitions are finished before you, for example, interact with an element by clicking it. In case the application under test constantly runs some background animations or hogs the accessibility event stream in some other way these waits may significantly slow down the automation flow.
Setting the value of waitForIdleTimeout
to zero 0
ms should completely disable any waits, and enforce interactions to happen immediately ignoring the accessibility event stream state. The downside of that would be that all interactions are never going to be delayed, so clicks and other actions might happen at wrong places of the application UI. That is why is it important to check the app under test first and fix its source to get rid of activities hogging the event loop. Sometimes it makes sence to disable animations completely for the app build under test, which could speed up your flows significantly in some situations.
Warning
waitForIdleTimeout
is a setting, not a capability.
Session Startup Issues
Sometimes various legacy driver parts might be cached on the device under test (like settings.apk), which would prevent a new/upgraded driver version from starting a session. Run
appium driver run uiautomator2 reset
in order to cleanup the cached UIA2 driver binaries from all connected devices on the current machine.
Socket Hangup Error
This type of error means the driver is unable to connect to the UiAutomator2 REST server, which is running on the device under test. There might be multiple causes to this issue:
- The automation session gets unexpectedly deleted if your test code sends the
DELETE /session/<id>
request to it, also the corresponding session and the server itself are terminated as a result. Sending further commands to the same server would create the error above because it is not listening anymore and must be newly started by the instrumentation first. Such issues usually happen if the session management is not configured properly in your code, so one starts a new session while an existing one is still running and has not been quit properly, or there is a timeout while waiting for a new command. Fixing session management logic (e.g. make sure each session is being properly created in the test setup section and is terminated in the test teardown) or changing/disabling the commands' timeout (check the newCommandTimeout capability) might help to address such type of errors. - The server has been unexpectedly killed by Android OS itself. There might be several reasons to that. Usually fetching the logcat output and finding occurrences of
io.appium.uiautomator2.server
traces with error
or exception
label might help to figure out what happens. Sometimes it is necessary to turn off some internal phone optimizations, sometimes the server crashes because of an internal UiAutomator framework bug, sometimes because of a bug in the server code itself. Each case should be investigated separately if the search over the internet shows no matches… - The connectivity between the phone and the host is unstable. Nothing much to add on this one. Maybe the phone has a defect, or the USB cable is damaged, or the installed Android SDK is out of date…
Element(s) Cannot be Found
All element location strategies in UIA2 driver work similarly under the hood except of the xpath one.
If some element is not found, but you see/assume it is present in the page source then make sure no race condition
happens. Add a timer and wait for a couple of seconds before giving up on the element location. In case the lookup
still fails after the timeout and your non-xpath locator is used then, most likely, it contains a typo, or the
destination element is not present. There is not much that could be done in UIA2 to change/influence that, since it passes such lookup calls directly to Google's UiAutomator framework.
In case of xpath locators you could try to change values of the following settings:
- allowInvisibleElements
- ignoreUnimportantViews
- enableMultiWindows
By default, the first setting is set to false
, which hides
elements that are not visible from the page source and from the xpath location. Changing the setting value
to true
would add such invisible elements to the page source and make them locatable.
The second one is enabled by default (e.g. true
). By disabling it the page source could receive more elements
that are normally hidden, because of their unimportance.
The third setting being set to true
extends the page source by adding the actual content of other windows that are currently present on the device's screen. For example, the on-screen keyboard in Android is not a part of the current app hierarchy, but rather belongs to a separate window.
In case of id locators you could try to change the value of the following setting:
- disableIdLocatorAutocompletion
The general resources naming convention for Android apps is <app_id>:id/<resource_name>
. This should guarantee uniqueness of each identifier accross the user interface. Although, this is only a convention and it is still allowed to have various resource names that do not follow it. If you have gotten one of such applications for automated testing then consider assigning disableIdLocatorAutocompletion
setting value to true
, so UiAutomator2 driver does not automatically rewrite supplied id values by adding <app_id>:id/
prefixes to them.
Warning
Default values for settings above have been selected to optimize xpath lookup and page source generation performance.
Having these settings always different from their default values may sometimes significantly (especially in case of huge accessbility hierarchies) reduce xpath lookup and page source generation speed.
Warning
All items above are settings, not capabilities.
ClassCastException: java.util.ArrayList$ListItr cannot be cast to org.eclipse.wst.xml.xpath2.processor
This exception happens due to a known bug in the Eclipse's Psychopath library used by UiAutomator2 driver to support XPath2 syntax. The issue has been observed while using following::
or preceding::
axes in xpath queries. Unfortunately, this library has not been maintained for quite a while, and there is no good open source alternative to it. The only known workaround would be to forcefully switch the driver's XPath processor to the standard Android's Apache Harmony-based XPath1, which does not have this issue (but also does not support XPath2 syntax). See the Appium issue #16142 for more details.
Usage Examples
import pytest
from appium import webdriver
from appium.options.android import UiAutomator2Options
def generate_options():
common_caps = {
'appium:udid': '123456',
}
app_options = UiAutomator2Options().load_capabilities(common_caps)
app_options.app = '/Projects/myapp.apk'
chrome_options = UiAutomator2Options().load_capabilities(common_caps)
chrome_options.browser_name = 'chrome'
chrome_options.chromedriver_executable = '/Project/chromedriver_linux64'
return [app_options, chrome_options]
@pytest.fixture(params=generate_options())
def driver(request):
drv = webdriver.Remote('http://localhost:4723', options=request.param)
yield drv
drv.quit()
def test_edit_text(driver):
locator = 'android.view.TextEdit' if driver.current_context == 'NATIVE_APP' else 'input'
edit_field = driver.find_element_by_class_name(locator)
edit_field.send_keys('hello world')
assert edit_field.text == 'hello world'
edit_field.clear()
assert edit_field.text == ''
API Notes
lock
behaves differently in Android than it does in iOS. In Android it does not take any arguments, and locks the screen and returns immediately.
Development
npm install appium-uiautomator2-driver
npm run watch
Unit tests:
npm run test
Functional tests:
npm run e2e-test