Frank 64bit support and iOS 9 support - Frank is dead for now.

[Florin Gogota]

Hi,

Sadly, for now it seems Frank is quite dead. Are there any plans to revive it and add proper 64bit support and iOS 9 support?

I'd appreciate if I could get an answer because is crucial in the decisions I have to take, to continue investing in automation with Frank or switch to something else.

Thank you.

[Joseph Masilotti]

I started my foray into UI testing on iOS with Frank a few years ago. I tried a number of different approaches and contributed back a few times to the project. Overall, I think I used it on three different apps (I worked for a consulting firm at the time).

About a year ago I tried something new and experimented with KIF, Subliminal, and UIAutomation directly. They each have their own pros and cons (see this Github repo [1] for more details). Unfortunately, not a single one could do everything I wanted or was reliable enough to use on client projects.

At the end, I ended up doing feature level tests per controller via a BDD-style framework because it proved to be more reliable. Obviously, it isn’t as close to user interaction as these frameworks are, but it was good enough. You also couldn’t do anything with “system alerts” but that’s a whole different story.

All that said I think anyone getting into feature testing on iOS should take a good, hard look at Apple’s recent addition to Xcode 7, UI Testing [2]. It uses a similar API to UIAutomation and you can even record clicks and then play them back to use in your tests. It also supports both Objective-C and Swift out of the box, no JavaScript required.

While it might be difficult to upgrade your existing [insert third-party feature testing framework] code now, I think in the long run it will pay off ten-fold. Apple changes their internal APIs with every release and the best a third-party library can do is rush to keep up. I would imagine that all three are struggling right now as I doubt any of them work out of the box with iOS 9.

[1] https://github.com/joemasilotti/ios-feature-testing

[2] https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/?id=406

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[Pete D'Alessandro]

My team is also moving toward apples UI Testing. I believe the current apple landscape makes any third party solution generally a bad idea. Things change too frequently.

Frank served us very well but I think we'll have better reliability using what Apple is making.

[Brian King]

There's also the ability to move frank into the UI Testing application target. The type of queries you'll be allowed to do will be restricted, but the idea of using Cucumber tests to drive UI Automation is very valuable in many environments.

But now that apple finally has a supported method of tapping things, I agree it should be used!

Brian