She is a Product Marketer with over 9 years of diversified experience across content, branding, and product marketing. Her experience ranges from global brands to nimble startups. She is a custodian of Brand & Content, telling stories about the brand that delights customers and provides compelling business value.
We are very excited! V.5.2 of pCloudy has been released with a number of exciting new features and product improvements. This update brings some path-breaking features, some revamped ones building on previous experiences, more mature than ever before.
Check it out yourself!
a)Test local or Staged sites with Local site emulation: It’s a path breaking feature for enterprise mobility. For all the users who have been asking for a solution to test their private servers on pCloudy devices before deploying them on production, we have a good news for you.
Now, you can access your site behind a firewall, on a staging server, or locally with pCloudy before it hits production.
Since private servers are internal to your network, they have no public access which makes it difficult to test on a device on cloud. Local Site emulation Testing provides a platform to test private or internal servers on any Android device present on pCloudy. Find the details about this feature here.
b) Test your app with Face ID feature: Apple introduced the ability to perform authentication via FaceID to enable secure and effortless access to the device. But it turns out to be a hindrance for mobility teams while testing their iOS apps on devices over cloud. To ease out the process of authenticating Face ID manually every time, you can now bypass the FaceID verification in your apps using our utility.
With this feature released, you can instrument your iOS app for both TouchID and FaceID on pCloudy. Isn’t it a bonanza for iPhone users? Click here to find out more about this feature.
c) Inspecting Element using Appium Desktop: Appium Desktop is a point-and-click interface for using Appium and inspecting your app’s structure. With this new feature you will be able to run Inspector sessions on pCloudy. You just have to login in to your registered account, set up the desired capabilities for your test appropriately, and you’ll be able to drive your app remotely using Appium Desktop. Read More
d) Releasing Follow Me Officially: ‘Follow Me’, the one-of-its-kind feature to speed up the manual app tests has been available on beta version for you to test your apps manually and report us the issues. After a rigorous quality assurance done for the features and fixing most of the issues reported, we are now releasing ‘Follow Me’ officially to manually test your apps in synchronous mode and accelerate it exponentially. Read More
So, the most awaited 2 days long Software testing conference STARWEST 2018 came to an end on 4th October, with the most insightful and pragmatic gathering and discussions to tackle the fast growing ‘software testing’ head-on. When the venue selected is supposed to be the “Happiest place on Earth – Disneyland”, how could you not be rejuvenated to take software testing to a next level.
With the top minds in software testing coming together to share the latest trends, tips on stage and through conference networking opportunities, STARWEST this year too has succeeded in bringing forth excellent insights about future of testing in rapidly changing times. More than 40 top companies participated in this one-of its kind Expo where we have witnessed some of the monumental key developments that would shape testing landscape in the coming years.
Over 1000 software testers gathered and more than 70 empanelled speakers graced the expo for 2 days. Attendees heard from experts like: John Bach from eBay, Adam Auerbach talking about how continuous testing in DevOps will help business achieve business success, Rob Somourin from Amibug.com, Max Saperstone from Coveros to name a few.
In between sessions, the pCloudy booth was flooded with people. Our team of three did their best to answer questions and get feedback from those who are already using pCloudy as well as folks who were new to pCloudy.
Here are the biggest lessons that we learnt at the STARWEST event this year:
1) Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are coming to help testing; not replace it:
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are playing key roles in this revolution through improvements in search results, recommendations, forecasts, and other predictions. Testing practitioners are recognizing the potential for advances in AI and ML to be leveraged for automated testing—an area that still requires significant manual effort.
Last year we came up with something which was quite new to the market our AI-based test bot for Mobile App – Certifaya. This year we see this trend catching up. There are quite a number of new tools focusing on NLP driven Automated Test case generation to AI driven self-healing automated tests. Good to see competition in this space! The race has just begun.
2) Testing can’t survive without Data analytics: Another major learning at StarWest event this year has been the growing importance of Data Analytics in Software Testing. We are in the age of Analytics where the test data captured are translated into actionable insights for future improvement. These solutions proactively identify problem areas in the testing process and indicate the way forward to achieve a high-quality software product. Predictive analytics uses mathematical algorithms and machine learning technologies to forecast outcomes of software testing procedures. This technique uses current and past data to generate insights and locate potential points of failure in software testing outcomes. This enables the development and testing leaders to proactively address issues early in the lifecycle, and hence faster and easier. The combination of test automation and advanced analytics will enable software development and testing managers to spend more time on strategic activities that drive greater business value over a longer term.
3) Flight plan for Agile and DevOps success: A new Forrester research project surveyed over 600 organizations to determine what matters the most for DevOps and Agile success. The research discovered high-level findings like:
a) Firms that are more mature in Agile+DevOps do five key things differently:
i) they allocate proper testing budgets and focus on upgrading their testing skills;
ii) they implement continuous testing to meet the demands of release frequency and support continuous delivery;
iii) they include testers as part of their integrated delivery teams;
iv) they automate end-to-end functional testing; and
v) they shift-left testing to earlier in the development life cycle. For firms that follow these five best practices, testing is a way to gain speed and efficiency, rather than a bottleneck to delivering faster.
b) Experts focus primarily on contextual metrics (e.g., requirements coverage) while others focus on “counting” metrics (e.g., number of tests).
c) Experts are more likely to measure the user experience across an end-to-end transaction while others rely on application-specific or team-specific metrics.
4) Exploratory testing rediscovered: The testing community is caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to exploratory testing. Although exploratory testing has been around for ages, it often leads to more confusion than clarity. Exploratory testing is the process of learning the product, designing test cases, executing test cases and interpreting the test results at the same time. It is a method that requires the tester to think critically through the entire process, making decisions based off factors such as the test scope, charter, and goals. This means that exploratory testing, by definition, cannot be automated.
That being said, there are aspects of exploratory testing that can be automated. Exploratory testing is able to go beyond the confines of automated tests. Automated tests can perform the majority of the “heavy lifting”, freeing up your testers to apply their considerable expertise and business knowledge to discovering new defects, testing usability, and exploring the program in a way that is deeper and more insightful than what an automated test can accomplish.
5) Mobile app a part of test strategy for enterprises for next 2 years: Among some interesting facts that we witnessed at StarWest this year, 60-65% of organizations mentioned that Mobile App is part of their strategy in the next 1-2 year. Many organizations are still relying on Mobile Web as their digital strategy on Mobile devices. This is expected from organizations starting their digital transformation journey but still, the number of higher than expected considering we are talking about the US market. Separate mobile and web teams still seem to be the case for most of the organizations.
This seems to be interesting because this is contrary to our above mentioned point where they stress on collaboration.
Robot Framework is a generic keyword-driven test automation framework for acceptance level testing and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). It has an easy-to-use tabular syntax for creating test cases and its testing capabilities can be extended by test libraries implemented either with Python or Java. Users can also create new keywords from existing ones using the same simple syntax that is used for creating test cases.
Appium Desktop is a point-and-click interface for using Appium and inspecting your app’s structure. With this new feature you will be able to run Inspector sessions on pCloudy. You just have to login in to your registered account, set up the desired capabilities for your test appropriately, and you’ll be able to drive your app remotely using Appium Desktop.
Let’s understand this in detail:
Overview
Appium Desktop is a new open source GUI application for Windows, Mac, and Linux which gives you the power of the Appium automation server in a more organized manner with a flexible UI. From an Appium Beginner’s perspective – if you want to write test scripts with Appium, you would need 2 things.
First, you would need to start the Appium Server. And second, you would also need a mechanism using which you can identify the controls (buttons, text boxes etc) in the mobile app which you want to automate.
So Appium Desktop is a combination of two essential components of Appium:
Appium Server: Server instance for enabling testing (and test automation) of apps.
Appium Inspector: For inspecting and getting all the details of UI elements of your apps.
Advantages of Appium Desktop
The Appium Desktop tool enables users to work with Appium on their desktops and use Inspector for yet better analysis of their apps.
Allows using desired capabilities and presets configuration for convenient use.
Provides the ability to switch between web-view and native app view from inspector.
Provides an action recorder and the code generator.
How to install Appium Desktop
Refer the link given below to know how and from where to install Appium Desktop.
1.Open Appium Desktop in your system and click on Start Inspector Session as shown in below screenshot.
2. Click on Select Cloud Providers.
2.1 Click on the pCloudy logo and then click on done.
2.2 You will be directed to the desired capabilities page of pCloudy in Appium Desktop.
2.3 Enter the below mentioned field details
pCloudy Host
pCloudy User Name
pCloudy API Key
2.4 Once field details are inserted, set the Desired Capabilities.
These are used to inform Appium Server that what kind of platform and application you want to automate. Click here to know about Desired Capabilities.
Note:
By default, Booking duration is 10 minutes. If you wish to change the device duration, you have to change the number of minutes in the desired capabilities. For example, if you to keep the duration for 15 minutes, you have to set desired capabilities as ” pCloudy_DurationInMinutes”, 15 “
3. Click on Start Session once you have entered the field details and set the Desired Capabilities.
4. Once session has started, login to your registered pCloudy account .
After login go to Reports section and then go to My Active Session. Click this icon present under Action. You will be directed to LIVE VIEW page.
Note:
Device will be connected as per the set Desired Capabilities. Once your app gets launched on the device you will able to see Appium Desktop view.
5.Click on Select Element to start inspection .
Example: In the below screenshot “Refuse” has been selected.
6.Once you select the element you will be able to see interactions .
Note:
There are three interaction given in Appium Desktop contributors. These are “Tap”, “Send keys” and “Clear” as shown in the screenshot.
7. According to the selected interaction action will be performed on the device page.
As shown in the screenshot Tap has been selected.
8.Click on this X icon to End the session.
Note:
As soon as you end the session device will get released from Live view.
While Apple fans are eagerly waiting for the new iPhones to be released, pCloudy committed to provide you with the newest, the fastest brings iOS 12 for you to test your apps.
iOS 12 is focused on improving the performance of iOS devices as a whole. Since this big feature announcement can’t be shown through screenshots, instead you need to experience it first-hand to find what’s new. Unlike previous iOS updates, iOS 12 focuses on performance especially on speeding up older devices.
Let’s find out the important and some hidden features in this update:
Device compatibility: This has been a highly compatible release update for iPhones till date. If your iOS works on iOS 11, iOS 12 will work on those phones. This means that all iPhones from iPhone 5S onward will be compatible with iOS 12.
Smoother and faster
As mentioned earlier, the prominent feature of iOS 12 isn’t something that has to be explained beyond screenshots. Infact it’s something that offers you to experience on your own. Instead of stuffing too many new features into iOS 12 and adding to some of the already irritating bugs we all experience, Apple is using iOS 12 to focus on bettering the overall performance of its iOS device lineup across the board. Apps should open faster, scrolling should be smoother and crashes should be fewer.
Detailed battery info
To find out what’s draining the battery on any mobile device is something we all want to learn more about. In iOS 12, you just need to open the Settings app, select Battery and you will have detailed information that you might need. New charts, breakdowns and graphs show you exactly what was using your battery and, perhaps most importantly, when it was used.
Alternate appearance in FaceID
There have been many issues reported in the past for the iPhones that support Face ID. Users have had trouble getting authenticated by Face ID while wearing a hat, sunglasses etc. that could change your overall appearance, will get the ability to register a second appearance. The new setting is found in Settings > Face ID & Passcode > Alternate appearance.
Indeed, this same feature can be used to register a second face to Face ID to give access of your phone to a second person. Just ensure that if you want to remove the second appearance (or face) you will need to reset Face ID.
Automatic OS updates
A new feature in iOS 12 will automatically install iOS updates on your device without requiring you to manually approve it. You can enable automatic updates in Settings > General > Software Updates > Automatic updates. With this feature enabled, whenever an update is released your iPhone will automatically update while you are away from your phone for long.
There are multiple other updates and additions in this iOS 12 which you can leverage and assure the quality of your app by testing it on the latest version of iOS now available on pCloudy.
For Apple lovers, Apple’s annual hardware showcase is more like celebrating Christmas in September. Apple employees work hard in the Cupertino workshop throughout the year to be ready for this day, when CEO Tim Cook takes the stage and offers the world a brand new iPhone. Infact 3 new iPhones.
Following last year’s iPhoneX, Apple announced iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR. There was also a session showcasing its most powerful wearable till now – Apple Watch Series 4.
Don’t worry if you have missed the event. We have all covered it all for you. Read on our blog to find out all about Apple’s big event.
We will cover about the iPhones announced later in the blog. Here we will have a look at the other product line updates apart from major mobile product announcements and how well those products are doing and more. Here is the highlight:
Cook talked about all the original Apple TV programs that’s been announced so far. In addition to that, Apple just signed deals for two movies: The star wolves and elephants.
Apple is about to ship its 2 billionth iOS device.
The iPhone XS uses recycled tin and bio-based plastics (and more), part of Apple’s clean and renewable energy push.
Updates to the HomePod to makes it more useful.
Price drops on the existing iPhones, with the iPhone 7 starting at $449.
You’ll be able to update to iOS 12 on Sept. 17 and MacOS Mojave on Sept. 24. (Is your device upgradeable to iOS 12? Find out more here
Now let’s have a look at the iPhones announced in detail.
iPhone XS and XS Max
Announcement of iPhone XS and XS Max come as a relief to iPhone fans who have been busy speculating and eagerly waiting for months for this big announcement. No more wait buddies! Here is a sneak peek at the 2 iPhones announced:
The iPhone XS Max is bigger than the Note 9, and both XS Max and the iPhone XS get a makeover inside and out.
The new Core ML engine for game speed was highlighted in the mobile version of Elder Scrolls: Blades and Galaga.
They incorporate the industry’s first 7nm CPU, the new A12 Bionic.
New cameras supplemented with AI-enhanced capabilities such as Smart HDR and facial feature detection (“facial landmarking”).
They boast better battery life.
Both support dual SIMs with an eSIM and a physical nanoSIM.
iPhone XS starts at $999, the iPhone XS Max starts at $1,099. Both are shipping on Sept. 21.
iPhone XR
Since it is difficult for everyone to afford iPhone flagships, so Apple announced iPhone XR. It has an LCD-based, 6.1-inch “Liquid Retina” display.
It’s bigger but less expensive than the iPhone X.
It too incorporates the A12 Bionic chip, the same wide-angle camera as the XS models, and the same AI-driven camera features.
Six finishes, four capacities, starts at $749. Preorders start from Oct. 19 and shipping from Oct. 26.
This implies that time has come to bid goodbye to iPhones SE, 6S and 6S Plus. In other words, bid farewell to iPhones with headphone jacks.
Here’s a look at the new iPhone prices compared at different locations.
Apple Watch Series 4
Thanks to its new zero-bezel design and having replaced the button with haptic touch regions, the new series of the Apple Watch increases its face size to 40mm and 44mm.
Comes with a bigger display and a smaller bezel, which offers 30 percent more screen space to display fitness stats, sport scores, and calendar information.
It has a better microphone and a speaker that Apple says is twice as loud as last year’s model, to make it easier to take phone calls, use the Walkie Talkie functionality, or bark commands at Siri.
A new dual core 64-bit processor, designed in-house, gives this one twice the performance speed, and a few new sensors make it possible for it to better track your health.
The Apple Watch now sends notifications when your heart rate is too low, or if your heart rhythm is irregular—helping to detect and diagnose problems early on. It can also tell if you’ve taken a hard fall, which will trigger an option to make an emergency call (literally Apple’s version of “help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!).
Most importantly, a new sensor in the Series 4 makes it possible to measure ECG, something that’s never been possible before in a consumer device. The FDA even gave it a seal of approval.
The watch starts at $399 for GPS, $499 for cellular. If that sounds like a serious chunk of change, some good news: The Series 3 gets a drop to $279.
Conclusion: As pCloudy has always been committed to provide you with the newest, the fastest, this time again we commit to provide you access to these new iPhones at the earliest. Keep a watch at this space for our new Phones announcement.
Are we not living in an amazing time? Technologically advanced, digitally sound!
We thrive on all things digital. The world around us is becoming all digital with limitless possibilities. Today as a consumer, you can preorder your coffee, interact with augmented reality in the store, and skip the lines at store with alternative payment methods.
To cut the story short, as a consumer, we have access to unlimited goods and services and connected around us. And mobile is at the center of all this change. It’s the tool that is bridging the gap between the digital and physical.
And the availability of 5 million apps come as a proof of this explosion. In the first quarter of 2018, Apple had 2 million apps on App store. As of the same quarter, Android users were able to choose between 3.8 million apps. More and more businesses are adopting Mobile Apps as their primary channel for business growth. This explosion proves that mobile is at the core of customer experience.
Before moving further into the topic, you can watch the entire webinar here or else you can skip the video and continue reading to get the gist of the webinar.
As a business mobile Apps are not just another channel. More and more organization are realizing that it can be a means to create awesome customer experiences. There are numerous examples to illustrate.
One such example is Starbucks.
The secret to Starbucks’ app’s success is that it gives users an intuitive experience, making it as easy to find a store, order your coffee and make a payment through their wallet. Recently, Starbucks has also taken the mobile app experience one step further with an innovative conversational ordering system powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The explosion in mobile apps imply to speed. How quickly you can make a change and let the customer experience it? The mathematics of velocity matter here. Market speed has left companies with a simple problem: How do we go faster than we ever have before, without losing an eye on quality?
The success stories like Facebook and Netflix tell us that we can
It is an amazing fact that Facebook mobile app is updated and refreshed every two weeks like clockwork. That’s the new normal. We will talk about this example in detail a little later in the webinar.
So in order to gain Quality@Speed, we reach to a point where experience and quality intersect and we name this convergence Quality@Speed. It’s a no brainer to say that Quality @ speed can be achieved with two fundamental principles.
Agile: Agility allows teams to work closely with business and it Pulls quality forward. It’s also called Shift Left of Quality. You are delivering small chunks to end consumers on weekly or monthly basis. This allows teams to get feedback early on.
DevOps: DevOps brings you speed. It’s a Shift left of operations.
DevOps practices allow you to create “ready to deploy code” on demand. In other words, it means deploying software and the environment on which it runs, automatically and on demand, at any stage of the software delivery lifecycle. You can truly have multiple deployment in a day.
If we dig deeper, DevOps is enabled by two practices Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. These two will not work in sync until you have continuous testing in place. It’s also proven by many independent studies.
Here, we have a look at the data extracted from World Quality report, 2017-18 showcasing the popular and the best practices followed in DevOps.
If we have a closer look at the data, we will find that 87% of CIOs and senior tech professionals use or are planning to use cloud based test environment. Depending on choice of organization, it could a Private or public cloud but it’s a must to achieve speed.
Second data point is about Continuous Testing, here as well more than 80% of respondents chose this as a preferred DevOps practice.
Let’s look at what some of the success stories say
Facebook follows Ship early and Ship often approach. They update their web app multiple times a day while their Mobile Apps with frequency of almost 2 weeks. This is possible with DevOps best practices they have been following from past few years.
If we analyze their DevOps story in short, we find that one of the biggest takeaway for Mobile Teams is their massive investment in device infrastructure. Every time they make a change to app, it gets tested on 2000 real devices. Imagine 2000 real devices! They have bypassed use of simulators or emulators.
Mobile DevOps Challenges
Now let us move on to have a look at some of the Mobile DevOps challenges that comes as an obstacle on the way of mobility teams.
Multi-platform Support
Mobile apps have multi environmental target. Mobile apps have to deal with device fragmentation as they need to be workable on multiple devices. This poses a test for Ops team to build an optimal device infrastructure. Moreover, it is difficult to keep pace with the ever changing device requirements.
Mobile apps as an enterprise front end
Mobile apps, that too, mostly the enterprise mobile apps catering to business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-employee (B2E) segment of apps, characteristically have very less trade logic on the mobile device itself. On the other hand, a B2C or a B2E mobile app
serves as a front end to enterprise mobility already in use by the firm, such as transaction processing systems, employee HR systems, or customer acquisition systems.
This implies that the mobile app, available on multiple platforms as a native or Mobile Web app, needs to be built and delivered aligned with the backend services. The biggest challenge for DevOps is to think about enterprise mobility holistically and manage their build and release processes and cycles.
The App store
The app store includes an extra asynchronous step to the deployment procedure since developers are not able to update apps on demand. Even for grave bug fixes, new app versions need to pass through an app store submission and review process. Continuous delivery here gets a roadblock and the instant delivery becomes “submit and wait.”
Build Challenges
Since apps today are supported on multiple platforms, numerous different builds of the app has to be triggered each time when a change is being deployed by a developer.
The build system and configuration for each supported mobile environment is dissimilar from the others. You will probably require a small farm of build servers to be provisioned and available to manage these multiple operating system builds.
A typical Mobile DevOps Architecture
Let’s try to depict the Mobile DevOps cycle. Some of the tools mentioned here are a representative set of tools in the respective category.
It starts with a Dev checking in a code to Git/Versioning system. That triggers the CI server to build the App which could be Internal build server or a cloud system like Circle CI. Once the build is successful, Unit tests are runs on Real devices. If the Tests are pass, build is pushed to QA Env. Where Automated regression tests are triggered on real devices. If that’s a pass App compatibility tests for new features are done.
The Evolution
We’ve by now witnessed quite a journey to reach Continuous Testing. “Classical” testing was intended for software delivery cycles spanning months or year. Agile has changed this norm to a 2-week development iterations—but now something extra is required to meet today’s insatiable demand for software. Attempts to fasten the process further, created a chasm between Development, Test, and Operations. That gap has been bridged with DevOps and Continuous Testing in order to move beyond that speeding up plateau. However, when we look into the future, it’s clear that even Continuous Testing will not be enough. We need “Digital Testing” to achieve extra acceleration and meet the quality needs of future. AI can help us get there.
Mobile Testing and AI
If you keep pace with the market buzz you will find there is an ongoing debate about what AI can do? When it comes to testing, lot of theories have started predicting that AI has the ability to replace testing. Well personally I don’t see this happening in near future. But we certainly are very excited about capabilities AI present in from of us.
When we an organization think of using AI to sole testing problems we think on three lines
a) Can it improve speed of current testing process?
b) Can it help generate meaning full data for me to make intelligent decisions?
c) Can it improve the test coverage and reduce cost?
So, are you ready to adapt a personal assistant for testing. So are you ready to say? Certifaya, Can you run an App Test for me? pCloudy’s AI powered bot, can automatically test the mobile applications over hundreds of real mobile devices and gives its users real time insights into the app’s behaviour and performance. Do you want to explore more? Try Certifaya for free now and testify it yourself. You can also go through our webinar on the same topic to understand it in detail.
pCloudy, a California based Mobile App testing platform with more than 50,000 users across the globe partnered with UST Global, a leading Digital Transformation solutions company. pCloudy is one-of-its-kind full life cycle testing platform for mobile apps developers, quality engineers and DevOps teams. This partnership will enable UST Global to offer digital applications with quality at high speed to their clients via a continuous testing process that leverages pCloudy’s Mobile Testing Platform. This strategic alliance between pCloudy and UST aims to disrupt quality engineering for digital applications and align testing with Agile and DevOps practices.
pCloudy is a single platform to offer full life cycle application testing for organizations from SMB to large enterprises to run tests on public, private cloud as well as on premise devices. Quality Engineering teams can run AI powered exploratory tests to automatically test the mobile applications over hundreds of real mobile devices and gives its users real time insights into the app behavior and performance. pCloudy supports Continuous development and testing of mobile apps through popular collaborative tools like JIRA and SLACK to deliver high-quality applications.
UST Global’s award winning and IP Driven Quality Engineering services are built to provide several compelling outcomes that can radically change the quality of your products and services. The company has inevitably changed baseline quality by several folds for many of its Global 1000 customers. UST Global has had enormous success with scale in QA Operations, and has consistently delivered exponentially more value in terms of savings, efficiencies, and speed. UST Global has vast experience in testing and automation of digital applications on emulators, cloud and on physical devices. The company’s digital testing assets includes tools/frameworks for coverage analysis, automation, crowd sourced testing and performance which helps to reduce time to market and improve application quality.
Having Appium 1.9.0 out, we find it to be a feature release, comprising multiple updates. Some of the key features brought forward in this release update are:
a. Appium users have been facing unlocking device issues with older versions of Appium. This had been a big headache but Appium has resolved this issue with update 1.9.0. Even if the device remains locked, Appium 1.9.0 is very much capable to unlock the device and run your script smoothly.
b. If the object is not identified anywhere in the script, you will be able to locate the error in Appium logs itself.
c. Appium 1.9.0 comes with much faster execution compared to its older versions.
d. The log information is more insightful and detailed than before.
Let us have a look at Feature release updates below: (Source: https://github.com/appium/appium/releases)
General
Full W3C Specification support.
Add full beta of Espresso driver for Android automation (used by specifying automationName capability to be “Espresso”).
Fix –async-trace server argument, and rename as –long-stacktrace
Sample code has been moved into the main repository to aid in maintenance.
Fix status retrieval to speed up performance.
iOS
Add support for Xcode 10 beta 5 and iOS 12 beta 5.
Add preliminary support for MacOS Mojave beta.
Add face id biometric support.
Fix retrieval of device time, and add optional format parameter.
Do not crash if there is no idevicesyslog when ending session.
Handle frames when page changes in Safari.
Add desired capabilities:
remoteDebugProxy – port or Unix domain socket on which a proxy for the remote debugger sits.
safariGarbageCollect – turn on/off JS garbage collection in Safari.
showSafariNetworkLog – print Safari network logs in the Appium server logs.
mjpegServerPort – port to which screenshots can be streamed.
Fix handling of settings updates, so simulators are not restarted unnecessarily.
Allow pulling of folder from real devices.
Add mobile: getContexts execute function, to retrieve meta-information (title, url, etc.) about available contexts.
Fix certificate retrieval and handling.
Fix cookie handling, to allow secure cookies.
Fix Safari timeout issues.
Add support to retrieve Safari network logs, as safariNetwork log type.
Android
Update Chromedriver to v2.41.
Get Chrome version for Webviews in Android 7+, to find correct Chromedriver.
Make sure UiAutomator processes are cleaned up during test.
Fix handling of autoWebview capability.
New desired capabilities:
mjpegScreenshotUrl – url to stream screenshots to.
chromedriverUseSystemExecutable – boolean flag to use the default Chromedriver installed with Appium, avoiding any attempt to find correct Chromedriver.
disableWindowAnimation – disable window animations on device (now available on UiAutomator and UiAutomator2).
pageLoadStrategy – page load strategy for Chromedriver.
Allow test-only APKs to be installed.
Fix implicit wait handling for finding elements.
Better handle Unicode IME installation.
Relax package validation logic.
Fix error in UiAutomator searches with nested quotes.
Perform accessibility refresh when needed on UiAutomator2.
Improve logic for determining if apps need upgrade.
Fix screen recording to allow longer recordings, up to 30 minutes.
Key challenge with Appium 1.9.0
Now, we bring to you the challenge area that we have been able to identify with this release.
Even after using the capability automationName as uiautomatortool, we were unable to locate the object in >=Android v8.0 devices
If you have been able to find out any workaround for this issue mentioned above, kindly share it with us in the comments section.
