How to setup Appium with the andrioid/ios simulators on Mac

In today’s fast-moving world of mobile app development, ensuring your app runs smoothly across different devices is more important than ever. Appium, a powerful open-source automation framework, makes this easier by allowing developers and testers to automate applications on both Android and iOS using a single codebase. Unlike platform-specific testing tools, Appium supports multiple programming languages like Java, Python, and JavaScript, offering flexibility and efficiency.

While setting up Appium with Android and iOS simulators may seem complex at first, the right approach makes it much simpler. This guide will walk you through the entire process – installing dependencies, configuring emulators and simulators, and getting everything ready to automate mobile or web applications seamlessly.

Prerequisites

Before diving into the installation, make sure you have the following:

• node installed ( if it’s not installed, run brew install node on mac)
• npm installed ( if it’s not installed, run brew install npm on mac)
• Java installed

With that out of the way, let’s start with the setup. We will look at the setup of both iOS and Android simulators with Appium.

• Setup iOS simulator with Appium
• Setup Android simulator with Appium

Let’s look at both of them one by one.

Setup iOS simulator with Appium

Install Carthage

brew install carthage

Install Appium

npm install -g appium

Verify installation Appium

appium -v

Install driver for iOS

appium driver install xcuitest

Install Xcode from the App Store

Now, install the Xcode from the App Store: Link

• Xcode includes an iOS Simulator, which is necessary to run tests without a physical device.
• Appium relies on the simulator to launch Safari or test mobile apps.

After the Xcode is downloaded, please ensure to install the iOS simulator during the installation process.

Install Appium doctor

Appium Doctor is a tool that helps verify if your Appium setup is correct and identifies any missing dependencies.

npm install -g appium-doctor

So, if we want to see whether the iOS setup is correctly done or not, then we can run the below command –

appium-doctor --ios

Check available devices

We can see which devices are available for running our Appium tests using the below command

xcrun simctl list devices

If you run into an error with the command above, try running the command below and then try again

xcode-select --install

Start Appium server

Run the appium command to start the appium server

As you can see, the Appium server has started on port 4723. We will use the “http://127.0.0.1:4723/” URL in our test case to run the first test with Appium.

Run the iOS simulator

As of now, the latest iPhone released by Apple is the iPhone 16. So, we’ll run the iPhone 16 simulator using Xcode.

• Select “simulator” from the “Open Developer Tools” option
• Next, choose the device you want to simulate, as shown in the video below.

That’s it! We’ve successfully set up the iOS simulator with Appium on our Mac.

Setup Android simulator with Appium

nstall Appium

npm install -g appium

Verify installation Appium

appium -v

Install driver for Android

appium driver install uiautomator2

Install Android Studio

Download and install the Android Studio – Download link

Set ANDROID_HOME environment variable

Run the below command to determine whether your Mac system uses ‘/bin/zsh‘ or ‘/bin/bash‘

 echo $SHELL

If the output is ‘/bin/zsh‘

Then run ‘vim ~/.zshrc‘

and if the echo $SHELL was ‘/bin/bash‘,

Then run the ‘vim ~/.bashrc‘

vim command will open the file in editor mode

Scroll to the bottom of the file using the arrow keys and paste the following lines:

export ANDROID_HOME=$HOME/Library/Android/sdk
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOME/tools
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOME/tools/bin
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOME/emulator

Save the file and exit

Run ‘source ~/.zshrc‘ or ‘source ~/.bash_profile‘ (depending upon the result of the shell command) to reload the configuration.

This should set the ANDROID_HOME environment variable.

Install Appium doctor

Appium Doctor is a tool that helps verify if your Appium setup is correct and identifies any missing dependencies.

npm install -g appium-doctor

So, if we want to see whether the Android setup is correctly done or not, then we can run the below command –

appium-doctor --android

Run the Android simulator

• Open ‘Android Studio‘
• Click on More Actions > Virtual Device Manager
• Click on the + icon and add the device of your choice
• Start the simulator by clicking on the run icon.

Start Appium server

Run the appium command to start the appium server

As you can see, the Appium server has started on port 4723. We will use the “http://127.0.0.1:4723/” URL in our test case to run the first test with Appium.

This is it for this article. We hope that you liked the article. If you have any doubts or concerns, please write to us in the comments or mail us at admin@codekru.com.