Appium inspector is not great in helping us to inspect the mobile elements in the iOS >9.3 and now current iOS version is in beta build of 10.3(At that time of writing this blog 😉 )

Apple stopped supporting UIAutomation in which iOS build taken from the XCODE 7.X. XCUITEST playing a major role to manage the UI Automation for the latest iOS application .APP build using XCODE 8.x

This blog posting helps you to inspect the mobile elements of Native, Hybrid and Mobile Web specific mobile/web elements using the open source utility of Macaca inspector, which is an perfect alternative for Appium Inspector in respect to iOS Automation in Mac;

I have used the real iPhone 6s device with iOS 10.2;

GitHub URL: https://github.com/alibaba/macaca

Please follow the below step to install the Macaca inspector in your Mac;

$ npm install app-inspector

Please follow the below step to invoke the Macaca Inspector in your machine in which it will install the webdriver agent in the real device and it will show the mobile screen with the element information in the safari browser;

$ ./node_modules/.bin/app-inspector -u

$ ./node_modules/.bin/app-inspector -u 6EE5E44A-F4F2-4A8A-AB5C-7A7FC9CC3512

Once executing the above command, you could see the above console window with the success response message of 200 including the connected device information of UDID and port number.

Now the mobile screen will be displayed in the safari browser and click the appropriate mobile/web element to visualise the element information in the right pane as stated below;

I have tried to capture the MobiKwik mobile element information using the Macaca Inspector;

Please note, webdriver agent is available under the node_modules of appium and it will be downloaded to your Mac while downloading the appium setup based on the below command;

$ npm install appium