Appium's older support for automating Android apps is via the UiAutomator
driver. (New to Appium? Read our introduction to Appium drivers).
This driver leverages Google's
UiAutomator
technology to launch automation sessions on a device.
Development of the UiAutomator driver happens at the appium-android-driver repo.
We recommend you upgrade to the UiAutomator2 Driver and use that driver instead, since this driver will not be supported moving forward.
In addition to Appium's general requirements:
- Java 7 installed and configured correctly for your platform
- Mac, Windows, or Linux OS with the ability to run the Android SDK
The way to start a session using the UiAutomator driver is to include the
platformName capability in your new session request, with
the value Android. Of course, you must also include appropriate
platformVersion, deviceName, and app capabilities, at a minimum. In the
case of this driver, for Appium versions below 1.14.0 no automationName
capability should be used, while for version 1.14.0 and above the automationName
should be set to UiAutomator1.
It is highly recommended to also set the appPackage and appActivity
capabilities in order to let Appium know exactly which package and activity
should be launched for your application. Otherwise, Appium will try to
determine these automatically from your app manifest.
The UiAutomator driver supports a number of standard Appium capabilities, but has an additional set of capabilities that modulate the behavior of the driver. These can be found currently at the Android section of the aforementioned doc.
For web tests, to automate Chrome instead of your own application, leave the
app capability empty and instead set the browserName capability to
Chrome. Note that you are responsible for ensuring that Chrome is on the
emulator/device, and that it is of a version compatible with Chromedriver.
To see the various commands Appium supports, and specifically for information on how the commands map to behaviors for the UiAutomator driver, see the API Reference.
Given that the setup instructions for this driver and the newer UiAutomator2 Driver are identical, please refer to the system, emulator, and device setup instructions on the UiAutomator2 Driver doc.