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Re:Maestro – Next Generation Mobile UI Automation by jztan on Tuesday February 25, 2025 @12:01PM (#43174454)
First of all, I didn't make this, let me be clear, and I don't work for the company Mobile.dev.

I've been looking for a replacement for Appium because the documentation for that site is absolutely garbage. Maestro boils everything down to YAML and runs its own test server so that you don't have to worry about connecting to the device drivers. It's missing an API but who needs an API when the CLI is so beautiful.

Does anyone know of anything on par with this that I should try? So far this has knocked my socks off.

Re:Maestro – Next Generation Mobile UI Automation by leland-takamine on Saturday March 01, 2025 @01:02PM (#43221773)
Co-author of Maestro here - really appreciate that support jztan! If you get a chance you should also try out web support which we recently released! And always open to feedback, so please let me know if there's anything you think can be improved!
Re:Maestro – Next Generation Mobile UI Automation by hugs on Saturday March 01, 2025 @01:09PM (#43221856)
What was the most garbage thing in your opinion re: Appium documentation?
Re:Maestro – Next Generation Mobile UI Automation by cschiller on Saturday March 01, 2025 @01:43PM (#43222236)
Hi Jztan, glad you're exploring this space! I'm the co-founder of MobileBoost, and I'd love to introduce our product, GPT Driver (https://www.mobileboost.io/).

We started two years ago with an AI-native approach, which is particularly useful for handling dynamic flows, hard-to-locate UI elements, and testing across multiple platforms and languages. Our main objective is to reduce test maintenance effort.

Duolingo recently shared their experience adopting our tooling: https://blog.duolingo.com/reduced-regression-testing/

We offer: a Web Studio – A no-setup-required platform with all tooling preconfigured. SDKs – Directly integrate with existing test suites (Appium, XCUI, Espresso).

Happy to answer any questions!

Re:Maestro – Next Generation Mobile UI Automation by bartekpacia on Saturday March 01, 2025 @05:33PM (#43224494)
Can I run this locally?
Re:Maestro – Next Generation Mobile UI Automation by cschiller on Saturday March 01, 2025 @05:57PM (#43224816)
Yes, you can use our SDKs to run it locally on Simulators, Emulators, and real devices. We also support popular third-party device farms via the WebDriver protocol.
Re:Maestro – Next Generation Mobile UI Automation by bartekpacia on Saturday March 01, 2025 @06:02PM (#43224880)
Oh Okay this is cool, I thought it's not possible (it's not mentioned at your frontpage at all).

How do your AI-features work when running tests locally using yout SDK? Do I need to provide my own token to some LLM provider?

Re:Maestro – Next Generation Mobile UI Automation by cschiller on Saturday March 01, 2025 @06:37PM (#43225295)
By default, the SDKs use our API endpoints, where we run a combination of models to maximize accuracy and reliability. This also enables us to provide logging with screenshots and reasoning to help with debugging.

That said, we're currently experimenting with a few customers who run our tooling against their own hosted models. While it's not publicly available yet, we might introduce that option going forward.

Would love to hear more about your use case, if a self-hosted setup is relevant or just the use of your own LLM tokens?

Re:Maestro – Next Generation Mobile UI Automation by stephan-qa on Saturday March 01, 2025 @08:33PM (#43226159)
Hey folks, Stephan here, cofounder of https://www.repeato.app! Not here to hijack the thread, but if you're looking for the right test automation tool for your specific use case, this might be relevant.

Repeato is a no-code/low-code mobile & web test automation tool that runs locally or in the cloud. You can record tests, tweak them via UI, and for more complex stuff (loops, API calls, file handling, etc.), there’s JavaScript support. Everything is stored in JSON and JPG/PNG — easy to version or sync to the cloud.

What makes Repeato stand out? A "computer vision first" approach. Instead of just relying on IDs/XPath/etc, it also uses visual fingerprints to find UI elements. This helps to reduce common flakiness sources like overlaid elements, unclickable buttons or screen animations. Of course, AI vision is baked in as well [1].

We also offer a headless test runner that can run locally or in the cloud [2].

Big shoutout to the Maestro team for open-sourcing so much! We’ve made some small contributions ([3][4][...]) and are working towards bigger ones — but we are a small bootstrapped startup, so we will need a bit more time to get things in shape first.

Happy to answer any questions!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TbXSNOqlAk [2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@repeato/cli-testrunner [3] https://github.com/repeato-qa/ios-connector/ [4] https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-native-ocr