Author: Wasiq Bhamla

Capabilities are a set of parameters that describe the device on which the Appium test should run, along with the application to be used for testing. These capabilities must be provided to the Appium Server while creating the session. With these capabilities, the Appium Server parses them, creates the session with the target device described in the capabilities, and installs or launches the target application on the device before our test starts executing.

Before we go into more detail with capabilities, let’s first understand Appium. Appium is an open-source mobile application testing framework and a complete ecosystem to help automate Android and iOS applications categorized across different mobile-based applications, like Native, Web, and Hybrid. It also supports automating Smart TV and Windows and macOS-based desktop applications.

Appium is the most popular open-source library that helps automate various platforms such as Android, iOS, tvOS, Mac, Windows, etc. It also supports automating applications such as Native, Hybrid, and Web.

Appium has been around for almost a decade, and its very first version, 0.0.1, was released ten years ago. The maintainers of Appium had supported Appium 1.x for almost eight years before they suggested using Appium 2.x beta versions. Even the very first 2.0.0 beta version was released almost three years ago. As everyone is aware, whenever a major version is released for any library, there must be a migration guide for the existing users to help them transition from the older version to the newer major version. In this Appium 2 migration guide, this is exactly what you will be learning. With this Appium tutorial, you will understand exactly what you must do to easily migrate from 1.x to 2.x version of Appium.

In recent times, many web applications have been ported to mobile platforms, and mobile applications are also created to support businesses. However, Android and iOS are the major platforms because many people use smartphones compared to desktops for accessing web applications.

As per Statcounter, Mobile is the clear leader with 61.16% market share, while Desktop has 38.84% market share.

Nowadays, automation is becoming integral to the overall quality of the products being developed. Especially for mobile applications, it's even more important to implement automation robustly.

As per Statista, the number of mobile users will likely be 7.26 billion by 2022 and will increase to 7.46 billion by 2025. This indicates how mobile applications will grow in the coming years, making mobile app testing extremely important.

In this age where new technologies are coming up rapidly, it’s very important to keep up with speed and ensure the highest application quality is delivered to the customers. If we see the user base of different operating systems, we can see that Android is currently the market leader worldwide. Let’s see this market trend:

Many companies want a mobile version of their web applications or even directly create mobile applications for their customers. Therefore, it must be tested thoroughly to ensure customers get quality applications.