In this article, let's walk you through why you should make the move to Appium 2.0. But first, let’s look back at the history of Appium.
The Appium core team announced the Vision of Appium during its first Appium Conference in London in 2018. During Jonathon Lipps' presentation on The Next Five Years, he announced the following goals:
An official extension to the W3C WebDriver protocol.
A set of Node.js base classes and libraries for easily writing drivers.
Multiple drivers, each one a WebDriver interface on top of the best automation tech of the day for a given platform, plus a helpful collection of other utilities. A stable API on top of a changing set of underlying technologies.
A community of practitioners who maintain an ever-expanding knowledge base of different platforms.
Nearly three years later, the Appium team released its first beta.
Jonathan Lipps then gave his State of the Union about Appium 2.0 during the Appium Conference in September 2021. During this presentation, he summarized his vision of Appium and highlighted one major point: WebDriver-compatible automation for everything.
Soon after, the Appium team announced the end-of-life of Appium 1.
What’s New with Appium 2.0
In addition to the introduction of plugins (code projects that allow for overriding, altering, extending, or adding behaviors to Appium), Appium 2.0 also introduced a new driver (code projects that introduce support for the automation of a given platform) ecosystem.
Independent driver development has opened the door to making it easier and faster to release drivers, features, and fixes. This helps testers and developers remove any delays and bottlenecks in their quality assurance processes while ensuring the apps are stable and compatible.
Appium 2.0 is also fully compliant with the W3C standards. This allows you to use the same standard for all drivers and seamlessly switch between Selenium and Appium for both mobile web and native app testing.
Why it’s Time to Migrate to Appium 2.0
As end-of-life software, newer drivers will not be released for Appium 1. This means that the latest and greatest new devices or OS versions will no longer be supported. You must be on Appium 2.0 to use them.
Plus, with independent driver releases, Appium 2.0 supports a way to release new drivers, features, and fixes more frequently and allows you to update them more easily.
How to Migrate to Appium 2.0 on Sauce Labs
Try Appium 2.0 if you want to save testing time while ensuring the quality of your mobile apps. We have a step-by-step Appium 2.0 migration guide to walk you through the entire migration process.
Maximize Coverage with Appium 2.0 in Sauce Labs
The latest Appium 2.0 beta is now available in our Real Device Cloud and on our Android Emulators/ iOS Simulators, to offer you coverage for the latest testing frameworks.
Appium 2.0 beta features updated drivers, including:
Android UIAutomator2 and Espresso*
iOS XCUITest
(*Espresso supported for Android Emulators)
When you use Sauce Labs, you can test with the latest drivers without any hassle. We handle the updates for you, ensuring seamless testing at all times.
