Mobile applications are becoming more and more important in our daily lives. From ordering clothes to grocery shopping, the services available via an app are increasing rapidly and users expect a seamless experience. This means that the automation focus is shifting more towards mobile devices. 

But did you know that there is a huge difference between interacting with a desktop browser and a mobile app? And that difference is just a few tiny hand motions! Because with desktop browser automation we mainly focus on using our mouse, but on devices, we use our fingers to execute all different kinds of gestures, like swipe, scroll, pinch/zoom, and many more. Did you also know that automating mobile gestures is one of the most overlooked features in mobile automation?The most common reason for this could be that we don’t know how to do it, or because it might just be too difficult. 

During this presentation, we will focus on how to mimic mobile gestures with Appium for Android and iOS. With a sample app we will explore and understand different gestures including how to scroll, swipe, and pinch/zoom and then create cross-platform and cross-device gestures. By the end of this presentation, you’ll learn how to improve the user experience of your mobile applications by adding gestures to your automation scripts.

Setting up Mac OS X for remote use or as a CI pipeline is never a great experience. Usually we all love using Linux for these purposes, sadly iOS devices don't work on Linux.. or do they? Wouldn't it be cool to just execute Appium servers for iOS devices on Linux machines in Docker containers?  Turns out you can absolutely do that and this talk explains how.

I have created go-ios (https://github.com/danielpaulus/go-ios) an open source library that allows you to access iOS device functions like:

• launch XCTests (like WebDriverAgent, an Appium requirement for iOS testing)
• start and stop apps
• and many more

from the command line on both, Mac OS X and Linux. 

Because we are using unstable, private Apple APIs, I included my reverse engineering tool "dproxy" that you can use to debug future iOS updates or add missing features to go-ios. 

Mobile automation is very challenging from select testing framework to preparing infrastructure.
Where will you run test? Emulator or real device, cloud platform or local machine?

Today I want to show how to build android and ios emulator clusters to run tests with appium. 

• for android we will use Selenoid which automatically runs container with emulator
• for ios we will use Selenium grid and connect appium servers on macs as nodes

So now you can forget about passing UDID to your tests. Just have one entry point per platform. Put host to remote driver and runt tests.