How to test app in Landscape or Portrait Mode using XCUITest

iOS apps are developed to serve various purposes from entertainment to eCommerce. At times a certain app/feature provides better vision and compatibility in certain screen orientations, viz Portrait and Landscape. While the default screen orientation for a mobile application is Portrait, but in certain cases like watching movies and playing games, the screen orientation makes a difference in the use experience.

Based on the application and its use case screen orientation can be altered to serve the purpose and provide better user experience. Hence, it should be tested for the application before making a release.

 You can test the orientation of our iOS device’ screen to run the tests either or both in Portrait and Landscape mode. XCUITest provides the instance property: orientation which extends to enum: UIDeviceOrientation, which describes the physical orientation of the iOS device. 

To change the orientation for testing, you do not necessarily have to launch the app. You can directly make the changes on device level, either on class or test setup methods so that the orientation is uniformly maintained and tested across tests without making repetitive changes for each test. 

Why to test apps in Landscape or Portrait?

In Mobile devices, its useful to view contents of the app in landscape and portrait modes depending upon usages and ease of accessing for users.  

Most mobile users use apps and their devices on both landscape and portrait mode. Hence it becomes important to test our apps too on both orientations. 

It is noteworthy, that you are setting and dealing with the device orientation, which indirectly shall rotate the apps screen as well and display the app on required orientations. 

How to test if an app is in Landscape or Portrait?

To simply fetch the current interface orientation of an iOS device, you can use the below command:

XCUIDevice.shared.orientation

where, orientation is an in-built variable of class UIDevice which returns the current device orientation in tests.  

This consist of instance properties such as, (each returning Boolean values)

• isPortrait

• isLandscape

• isFlat

• isValidInterfaceOrientation

isPortrait

• returns true if the orientation of the device is portrait 
• returns false if the orientation of the device is landscape

For Example,

var device = XCUIDevice.shared.orientation
print(device.isPortrait) // returns true or false

isLandscape

• returns true if the orientation of the device is landscape
• returns false if the orientation of the device is portrait

For Example,

var device = XCUIDevice.shared.orientation
print(device.isLandscape) // returns true or false

How to set and test the device in Landscape or Portrait?

An app can be set to landscape or portrait orientation, by using one of the four device rotation options:

• .portrait
• .portraitUpsideDown
• .landscapeLeft
• .landscapeRight    

Let us look into each of the above in detail with examples of code snippets in Swift language. 

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.portrait 

It sets the device on portrait mode vertically having devices’ home button on the bottom

For Example,

var device = XCUIDevice.shared.orientation
device = .portrait // device under test is set to portrait
XCTAssertTrue(device.isPortrait) // tests if device is in portrait

.portraitUpsideDown 

It sets the device on portrait mode vertically having device’ home button on the top

For Example,

var device = XCUIDevice.shared.orientation
device = .portraitUpsideDown 
XCTAssertTrue(device.isPortrait) // tests if device is in portrait

.landscapeLeft 

It sets the device on landscape mode horizontally having device’s home button on the right

Example:

var device = XCUIDevice.shared.orientation
device = .landscapeLeft 
XCTAssertTrue(device.isLandscape) // tests if device is in landscape

.landscapeRight 

It sets the device on landscape mode horizontally having device’s home button on the left 

For example,

var device = XCUIDevice.shared.orientation
device = .landscapeRight
XCTAssertTrue(device.isLandscape) // tests if device is in landscape

How to run XCUITest in Landscape or Portrait with BrowserStack integration?

While, you can configure our tests to run on landscape as well as portrait mode from test scripts itself, we can also configure the same on CI configuration files while integrating with BrowserStack App Automate. 

For Landscape orientation:

curl -u "username:accesskey" \
-X POST "https://api-cloud.browserstack.com/app-automate/xcuitest/v2/build" \
-d '{"deviceOrientation": "landscape", "devices": ["iPhone 8 Plus-11.0"], "app": "bs://f5L3azt9pLzE995f49376eb1fa3c284dc321f8d", "testSuite": "bs://6eb1fa3c284ddbe9971b2d1aee0d52943b9c081"}' \
-H "Content-Type: application/json"

For Portrait orientation:

curl -u "username:accesskey" \
-X POST "https://api-cloud.browserstack.com/app-automate/xcuitest/v2/build" \
-d '{"deviceOrientation": "portrait", "devices": ["iPhone 8 Plus-11.0"], "app": "bs://f5L3azt9pLzE995f49376eb1fa3c284dc321f8d", "testSuite": "bs://6eb1fa3c284ddbe9971b2d1aee0d52943b9c081"}' \
-H "Content-Type: application/json"

Conclusion

While testing mobile applications, it is always recommended to test on real devices, to ensure that the real user conditions are taken into consideration. Testing on emulators and simulators does not provide accurate results as it just mimics the device environment, ignoring real world scenarios. 

Hence tests like running apps in Landscape or Portrait mode should be done on real devices only. BrowserStack Real Device Cloud allows access to a large fleet of Android and iOS mobile devices, so much so that iPhone 14 is available for testing right from Day 0. 

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