Overview

The XCUITest driver is an Appium driver intended for black-box automated testing of several Apple ecosystem platforms.

Target Platforms¶

The driver supports the following Apple platforms as automation targets:

A detailed breakdown of the supported platform versions can be found in the Installation page.

The following application contexts are supported for automation:

Note that only debuggable webviews are supported.

Under the hood, the driver combines several different technologies to achieve its functionality:

Native testing
- Based on Apple's XCTest framework
- Provided by the appium-webdriveragent library (a fork of the original implementation by Facebook)
- Uses the W3C WebDriver protocol with several platform-specific extensions
Webview testing
- Based on Safari's WebKit Remote Debugger Protocol (not officially documented)
- Provided by the appium-remote-debugger library
- Interaction with webpages is based on Selenium atoms
- Can only use the legacy JSONWP protocol due to the atoms
- Better, WebDriver protocol-compatible support is also provided by the Appium Safari driver
Simulator communication
- Based on the xcrun simctl and other xcrun command line utility calls
- Provided by the appium-ios-simulator library
Real device communication
- Legacy approach (to be eventually deprecated)
  - Based on re-implemented libimobiledevice system calls
  - Provided by the appium-ios-device library
- Modern approach (iOS/tvOS 18+ only)
  - Based on remote XPC services
  - Provided by the appium-ios-remotexpc library