Editor's note 1: Appium was developed by Dan Cueller, who had previously worked at Zoosk and Microsoft. It is an open source mobile functional testing framework that allows coding in the language of the coder's choice. It was recently included in this piece by Forbes.

Sauce Labs announced the release of Appium 1.5.3 through npm and the Sauce Lab on June 8.

Appium 1.5.3 is primarily a bug-fix release. However, it also adds functionality to support for iOS WKWebViews and for automating the iOS Calendar app, as well as adding a capability to use abd for screenshots in Android web/hybrid sessions, and providing a list of Android activities to wait for on session startup.

General

• Fix handling of statuses from proxied drivers (Chrome, Selendroid, etc.).
• Fix intermittent bug where creating a directory might crash the server.

iOS

• Add support for WKWebView-based webviews.
• Add support for automating the built-in Calandar app.
• Fix bug where scrolling in Safari would crash.
• Fix handling of Safari in “new window” state.
• Fix handling of arguments for keys method so that clients that send an array do not fail.
• Clean up handling of ipa files for real device tests.
• Make sure processArguments parsing works.

Android

• Add nativeWebScreenshot capability, to use adb screenshots instead of ChromeDriver if necessary.
• Add support to auto-select device based on platformVersion rather than using first available device.
• Allow appWaitActivity to be a list of activities.
• Fix setting wifi and data state.
• Implement initAutoWebView capability.
• Report appPackage, appActivity, and deviceUDID when requesting session details, so tests have more information about running state.
• Make sure unlock app is closed at the end of a session so that the device works again.
• Fix handling of unlock to make less flakey.
• Make sure unicode encoding works correctly when strings are long.
• Fix handling of disableAndroidWatchers capability.
• Fix bug where early ChromeDriver failure crashed Appium.

Editor's note 2: For those of you who don't know Sauce Labs, it is a company that specializes in software that strives to make testing more effective and easier through improved app quality and live share, among other elements. It was founded in 2008 and is now rockin the Bay Area.