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I am using Selenium and Appium to test WebApps across various browsers and platforms, including Windows, Apple (Mac, iPad, iPhone) and Android. Recently, Selenium and Appium on Apple have hit a blocking defect, reported here: Selenium tests broken by recent update of safari to version 13?. These were traced to underlying WebKit issues. No sign so far of anyone doing anything about this - it means all test Apple devices must remain un-updated until a fix or workaround becomes available. Clearly, not a situation that could be tolerated for too long (as users auto-update and get Safari v13.x).

With this in mind, I'd like to ask: Would anyone like to recommend open source or free alternatives to Selenium and Appium that offer similar functionality and work across all major platforms/browsers? Ideally frameworks that work with Python (but could also consider JavaScript and Java).

Ron Kalian
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    I haven't had time to check it out myself, but this looks interesting: https://smashtest.io/. – Mate Mrše Oct 16 '19 at 11:04
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    I’ll simply point out here that any “WebDriver compliant alternative” to Selenium would suffer from the same issue, at least for desktop Safari. The WebDriver protocol gives a URL end point for the library to call; the library calls it. – JimEvans Oct 16 '19 at 18:43
  • @JimEvans that's a fair point. I was hoping a well maintained and responsive project would have implemented a workaround - so thought I'll ask just in case one existed. – Ron Kalian Oct 16 '19 at 21:16

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Apple commonly does this with regards to both Selenium and Appium. A while back, with the iOS 10(or so) update, they deprecated a bunch of code that was being used by Appium in automating iOS applications. This was done in favor of moving developers and testers to their own automation tool XCTest, which is native to XCode.

iOS Automated Tests - XCTest vs Appium

XCTest will be a much better option for automating iOS browsers and applications than Appium.

I don't have a great recommendation for non-mobile Safari.

Zach Johnson
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I did a brief comparison for XCTest and Appium. XCTest is much faster than Appium.

However that means if you are sharing automation script between Android and iOS , this will not work. I prefer the wide varieties of open source options with selenium / appium compare to xcode that is limited

However if you are doing only ios , have the source and need speed , working on XCTest may be a better alternative.

john
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