Migrating to Appium 2.0 on BrowserStack

Appium 2.0 is a major upgrade to the Appium framework with some exciting features. Primarily, it aims to re-envision Appium as a platform by providing an independent driver ecosystem, plugin ecosystem, and removing certain old and deprecated functionality. For more details on Appium 2.0, check out Appium 2.0 documentation.

BrowserStack now supports Appium 2.0 server along with supported drivers and plugins allowing you to run tests using Appium 2.0 on BrowserStack’s real mobile device cloud.

Getting Started with Appium 2.0 on BrowserStack

Before you get started with Appium 2.0 on BrowserStack, note the following changes :

1. W3C webdriver protocol is enforced

Appium 2.0 enforces strict compatibility with the W3C webdriver protocol and deprecates legacy protocols such as JSONWP & MJSONWP protocol. You need to ensure that Appium capabilities provided in your tests follow W3C standard. You can either edit your scripts to make them compatible with W3C or rely on majority of the updated Appium clients that support W3C out of the box.

For more details on how to generate W3C compatible capabilities, check out W3C Capability Builder page.

2. Supported Appium 2.0 Capabilities

In W3C standard, there are following kinds of capabilities :

• Standard W3C capabilities : Capabilities such as platformName which are part of WebDriver Protocol spec. For more details, check out the W3C webdriver capabilities guide.
• Appium vendor capabilities : All the Appium capabilities beyond standard W3C capabilities. These capabilities must have appium: prefixed or need to be wrapped in the appium:options object.
• BrowserStack vendor capabilities : All the BrowserStack-specific Appium capabilities. These capabilities need to be wrapped in the bstack:options object.

For example, check the following snippets :

DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();
capabilities.setCapability("platformName", "android");

capabilities.setCapability("appium:platformVersion", "9.0");
capabilities.setCapability("appium:deviceName", "Google Pixel 3");

HashMap<String, Object> browserstackOptions = new HashMap<String, Object>();
browserstackOptions.put("appiumVersion", "2.4.1");
capabilities.setCapability("bstack:options", browserstackOptions);

var capabilities = {
"platformName" : "android",

"appium:platformVersion" : "9.0",
"appium:deviceName" : "Google Pixel 3",

'bstack:options' : {
    "appiumVersion" : "2.4.1",  
},
}

caps = {
    "platformName" : "android",
    "appium:platformVersion" : "9.0",
    "appium:deviceName" : "Google Pixel 3",

    "bstack:options" : {
        "appiumVersion" : "2.4.1"
    }
}

capabilities = {
    "platformName" => "android",

    "appium:platformVersion" => "9.0",
    "appium:deviceName" => "Google Pixel 3",

    'bstack:options' => {
        "appiumVersion" => "2.4.1",
    },
}

AppiumOptions capabilities = new AppiumOptions();
capabilities.AddAdditionalCapability("platformName", "android");

capabilities.AddAdditionalCapability("appium:platformVersion", "9.0");
capabilities.AddAdditionalCapability("appium:deviceName", "Google Pixel 3");

Dictionary<string, object> browserstackOptions = new Dictionary<string, object>();
browserstackOptions.Add("appiumVersion", "2.4.1");
capabilities.AddAdditionalCapability("bstack:options", browserstackOptions);
//...

For more details on how to generate these capabilities, check out the W3C Capability Builder page.

2.1 Supported Appium driver capabilities

BrowserStack supports the following drivers and capabilities:

2.2 Supported Appium plugins

BrowserStack currently supports following plugins:

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