Appium 1.15 Released

Appium 1.15 is out! Check out my highlights from the changelog below, my comments in italics:

General

• Add --base-path server argument to set a custom route prefix #13079. This means you don't have to have your Appium server running at "/wd/hub" anymore if you don't want to!
• Make it possible to start server without an app or a package id using UiAutomator2 and XCUITest #337 #195
• Internally, WebDriverAgent, UiAutomator2 and Espresso servers operate only through W3C spec protocol. Yay, no more old protocols floating around!

IOS (XCUITest):

• Support iOS 13/Xcode 11. iOS 13 release is huge
• Settings (these can all be toggled to different values throughout the course of the test)
  • mjpegScalingFactor #983
  • snapshotTimeout #181
  • useFirstMatch #187
  • defaultActiveApplication #209
  • activeAppDetectionPoint #215 #218
• New capabilities
  • includeSafariInWebviews #1060
  • safariGlobalPreferences #1057
• Remove some third-party dependencies (this is big news because we no longer need to install these dependencies on the system to automate real iOS devices--all we need is Appium!)
  • idevicedate #1042
  • iproxy #996
  • idevicesyslog #1000
  • idevicelocation #1006
  • ifuse #1019
  • ios-webkit-debug-proxy #1023
• Add ability to automate split screen applications #214 #215 #204 (Split screen apps are a new important category of iOS app we need to be aware of)
• Switch async execute to not need CORS (works for real and simulated devices) #1063 (this is nice because we used to have to disable CORS protection on the Appium server to get async execute working).

Android General

• Default Chromedriver version is 77.0.3865.40 #143
• Add server feature to enable automated Chromedriver downloads #548. Hooray, no more going and downloading Chromedriver manually!
• New capabilities
  • waitForLaunch #556 #327
  • ensureWebviewsHavePages #553. Sometimes you can get webviews that don't actually have pages and aren't automatable by Chromedriver, so this prevents them from showing up in the context list.)
  • enforceAppInstall #573

There's lots more to the changelog; these are just the bits I felt like calling out. Check out the rest here! And as always, you can get the latest simply with npm install -g appium!