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.

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.

Important: Please ensure that you download Appium Desktop version 1.21 specifically for this process.

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.

http://www.automationtestinghub.com/appium-desktop/

Pre-requisites to use the tools effectively.

Appium Desktop installed on your machine
APK or IPA file
pCloudy Account

Steps

Open Appium Desktop in your system and click on Start Inspector Session as shown in below screenshot.
Click on Select Cloud Providers.
1. Click on the pCloudy logo and then click on done.
2. You will be directed to the desired capabilities page of pCloudy in Appium Desktop.
3. Enter the below mentioned field details
  1. pCloudy Host
  2. pCloudy User Name
  3. pCloudy API Key
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 30 minutes, you have to set desired capabilities as "pCloudy_DurationInMinutes”, 30"

Click on Start Session once you have entered the field details and set the Desired Capabilities.
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.

Click on Select Element to start inspection .
Example: In the video the "Refuse" button has been selected.
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.

According to the selected interaction action will be performed on the device page.
In the video Tap has been selected.
Click on this X icon to End the session.

Note: As soon as you end the session device will get released from Live view.