Limitations for Testing Native Mobile Applications

The known limitations for playing back tests and recording locators on native mobile applications (apps) are:

• The following classes, interfaces, methods, and properties are currently not supported for native mobile applications:
  • IKeyable interface.
    • pressKeys method
    • releaseKeys method
  • MobileDevice class.
    • When testing a native mobile application on iOS, the setLocation method is not supported.
    • When testing a native mobile application on an Android version prior to Android 6.0, you have to enable Allow mock locations to use the setLocation method. To do so, open the settings of the Android device or emulator and tap Developer Options.
    • When testing a native mobile application on Android 6.0 or later, you have to set the app to Appium Settings to use the setLocation method. To do so, open the settings of the Android device or emulator and tap Developer Options > Select mock location app. Then choose Appium Settings.
      Note: The Appium Settings entry is only available if you have already executed a test with Appium on the Android device or emulator.
• When testing on iOS, the getValue method of the XCUIElementTypeSwitch class returns the strings false or true depending on the checked state, instead of returning the strings 0 and 1.
• Recording in landscape mode is not supported for Android emulators that include virtual buttons in the system bar. Such emulators do not correctly detect rotation and render the system bar in landscape mode to the right of the screen, instead of the lower part of the screen. However, you can record against such an emulator in portrait mode.
• Only HTML attributes in the HTML DOM are supported in XPath expressions for mobile applications. Silk4J does not support properties in XPath expressions.
• At any given point in time, you can test on multiple physical iOS devices that are connected to the Mac, but only on one iOS Simulator that is running on the Mac. With Silk Test 17.5 Hotfix 1 or later, you are no longer required to use multiple user sessions on a Mac to test mobile applications on iOS.
• Silk4J does not support text recognition when testing native mobile applications on both Android and iOS.
  Text recognition includes the following methods:

  • textCapture
  • textClick
  • textExists
  • textRectangle
• Silk4J does not support testing native mobile applications with multiple web views.
• When testing on iOS, the state of the isVisible property is always true, even if the element is not visible.
• When testing on iOS, a swipe action with multiple steps swipes to a point, releases the mouse pointer and then swipes to the next point. On prior versions of iOS, the action does not release the mouse pointer between the swipes.
• When testing on iOS, Silk4J does not support any multi-touch actions except pinch.
• When testing on iOS, Silk4J does not support the pinchIn method.
• When testing on iOS, you can only accept or dismiss alert dialog boxes. If no Cancel button is available and Silk4J cannot dismiss the dialog, the default action is to accept the dialog.
• When testing on Android, Silk4J does not provide automated synchronization for controls of the Animation class.
• When testing toasts on Android, the following limitations apply:
  • During recording, Silk4J always displays the rectangle for the toast in the lowest quarter of the Recording window, independent of the actual position of the toast.
  • During recording and replay, the detection of a toast by Silk4J always has a duration of five seconds, even if the toast appears in a shorter time period.

• When testing on iOS, Silk4J does not provide automated synchronization for controls that call the UIView.animate function or the UIView.animateWithDuration function.

  You can workaround this issue by increasing the speed of the animation in the app delegate:

  func application(application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [NSObject: AnyObject]?) -> Bool {
    //...
    if NSProcessInfo.processInfo().environment["automationName"] == "Silk Test" {
      // Speed animations up (recommended)
      window!.layer.speed = 100;
    }
  }

  Micro Focus does not recommend disabling such animations completely, as this might change the applications behavior. However, if speeding up the animation does not resolve the synchronization issue, you could completely disable animations in the app delegate as follows:

  func application(application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [NSObject: AnyObject]?) -> Bool {
    //...
    if NSProcessInfo.processInfo().environment["automationName"] == "Silk Test" {
      UIView.setAnimationsEnabled(false)
    }
  }

• When testing on iOS, the following additional limitations apply:
  • You might experience performance decreases while recording and replaying tests.
  • Due to internal changes in iOS, the locators of some controls might have changed, and some of your existing tests might break.
  • Text fields that are not in focus might not be recognized as text fields. To ensure that text fields are recognized correctly, set the focus on the text fields, for example by clicking on a text field before trying to interact with it.