Troubleshooting

This page aims to act as a reference for issues that may be encountered when using the Inspector.

Cannot open the app after installation¶

Cannot start a session using plugin version¶

The reason for this issue is cross-origin resource sharing (CORS). The browser will prevent you from connecting to the Appium server if the base URLs of the Inspector and the Appium server do not match (the server typically uses 127.0.0.1).

If the base URLs of the server and the Inspector differ (localhost is considered different from 127.0.0.1), CORS must be explicitly allowed when starting the server:

Appium 2-3Appium 4

appium --use-plugins=inspector --allow-cors

appium --use-plugins=inspector --allow-insecure='*:cors'
# alternatively: appium --use-plugins=inspector --relaxed-security

This will instruct the server to sent the correct CORS-related headers, and it should be possible to create a session.

Note

If you encounter this issue with a cloud provider, the fix must be applied on the provider side, because they are the ones hosting the Appium server.

Cannot see full source tree with XCUITest driver + React Native app¶

This is a known issue. The problem is caused by Apple's XCTest framework, so unfortunately it cannot be resolved from the Appium side. However, there are a few suggestions that may help mitigate this:

Set the snapshotMaxDepth setting to 62 (the maximum stable value)
Configure the pageSourceExcludedAttributes setting to exclude some attributes that you may find less relevant (e.g. "visible,accessible")
Set the customSnapshotTimeout setting to a higher value (for XCUITest driver version < 8)

If these do not help, then the only remaining solution is to work with the app developers to refactor the application code. Some suggestions from the linked issue thread include:

Try to remove unnecessary nesting levels
Use the Fabric renderer with View Flattening
Use native stack navigator instead of stack navigator
Reduce the amount of view tags/test IDs