Toggle between iOS application during AUT

     According to one recent report, smartphone users use on average 9 apps per day, and 30 apps per month. Many apps today provide value by integrating with other aspects of the mobile phone experience, even if it’s just as simple as taking photos using the device’s camera. Testing of multi-app integrations with iOS has been challenging, because Apple’s automation model allowed automation only so long as the AUT was running. The second you switched to another app to automate another part of your user flow, the automation would die. Thankfully, with Appium’s XCUITest driver (available with iOS 9.3+), we’re no longer limited to this kind of sandbox.

     There are so many kinds of multi-app flows we could experiment with, but let’s imagine a scenario involving the camera. Let’s say your app allows the user to take photos, and modifies them in some way before finally saving them to the system-wide photo library (the Camera Roll). One key verification for testing your app will be ensuring that, after performing the necessary steps in your app, the photo is newly available in the Camera Roll album of the Photos app.

     This is all possible to encode into your Appium scripts using two handy commands: mobile:launchApp and mobile:activateApp. We know that the launchApp before, in the Appium. activateApp is just the same, only the app must already have been launched; activateApp merely brings it back to the foreground. Here are examples of how we’d use these commands, by incorporating the Bundle IDs of the apps we’re dealing with (having these Bundle IDs available is a pre-requisite),

// launch the photos app (with the special bundle id seen below)
HashMap<String, Object> args = new HashMap<>();
args.put(“bundleId”, “com.apple.mobileslideshow”);
driver.executeScript(“mobile: launchApp“, args);

// re-activate that AUT (in this case The App)
args.put(“bundleId”, “io.cloudgrey.the-app”);
driver.executeScript(“mobile: activateApp“, args);

      I believe this is so simple with Appium we can really pretend we are a user and do all the things a user would do in order to check the appropriate conditions. And chances are, you have a different requirement than verifying photo saving. So the thing to take away is the principle of using mobile: launchApp and mobile: activateApp. What’s nice is that this particular strategy will work not only for simulators but also for real devices.

Try to use this logic of switch applications during your iOS Appium automation.

Reference: Appium Pro

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