A Brief Introduction to Appium Inspector: Part 1 — Creating Sessions

How to use Appium Inspector’s GUI to create an inspection session

A repost of my daughter’s article with permission. I added a few notes. This is also included in the “Courtney’s Appium Series”.

In previous articles, we focus on the set-up of Appium (XCUITest) Execution in a Simulator. In most of those articles, I provided element Ids and XPaths to get there. In this article, I’ll briefly introduce how to set up and use Appium Inspector so that you can get these locators yourself.

For web automation, browser’s have an Inspect mode to view attributes such as id and name. While the same principle applies to mobile test automation, it is harder because as far as I am aware there is no equivalent built-in inspector in mobile apps.

Zhimin: for this reason alone, mobile test automation is a lot more challenging thatn web test automation. Having said that, 99+% web test automation attempts failed (see, Definition of End-to-End Test Automation Success) sfor various reasons.

Therefore, we will use a separate utility, such as Appium Inspector. Appium Inspector (also created by the Appium team) is a GUI Inspector for mobile and desktop apps.