History of Appium Tool

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Dan Cuellar was the Test Manager at Zoosk in 2011, when he encountered a problem. The length of the test passes on the iOS product was getting out of hand. For this problem, He realized automation was the answer. Dan surveyed the existing landscape of tools, Unsatisfied with the existing options, Dan asked his manager for some additional time to see if he could find a better way. iOSAuto is born.

Dan was selected to speak at Selenium Conference 2012 in London about an entirely different topic. As part of his presentation, he showed off iOS Automation using Selenium syntax to demonstrate writing platform-agnostic tests that use separate platform-specific page objects with a common interface.

On the second day of the conference, Dan stepped up on stage to give the lightning talk. Jason Huggins, co-creator of Selenium, moderated the lightning talks.

Four months after the Selenium Conference, Jason called Dan. Jason remembered Dan's lightning talk and thought the project might be useful to Jason's work, but Dan's source code was not public. Jason asked Dan to meet up. Later that week, Dan met Jason in a bar in San Francisco and showed him the source code for iOS Auto.

Jason encouraged Dan to release his code under an open source license. In August, Dan released the source code on GitHub in C# and then new version in Python. In September, Jason added a web server and began to implement the WebDriver wire protocol over HTTP, making iOS Auto scriptable from any Selenium WebDriver client library in any language.

Jason decided that the project should be presented at the Mobile Testing Summit in November, but suggested that the project get a new name first. Many ideas were thrown out and they settled on AppleCart. A day later, while he was perusing some of Apple’s guidance on copyright and trademarks, Jason noticed that under the section of examples for names Apple would defend its trademarks against, the first example was “AppleCart”. He called Dan and informed him of the situation, and they decide new name Appium.. Selenium for Apps.

In January 2013, not long after the Mobile Testing Summit, Sauce Labs decided to fully back Appium and provide more developer power. A task force was created to evaluate the current state and how best to move forward with the project. The team, which included Jonathan Lipps (the current project lead), decided that Appium needed a rebirth, and ultimately settled on Node.js as the framework to use. 

Ultimately, Jonathan decided that getting Appium in front of as many developers at conferences and meetups was the best way to attract users and contributions. Appium in its new incarnation was debuted at the Google Test Automation Conference 2013. Later in 2013, Appium was presented at conferences and meetups all around the US, as well as in England, Poland, Portugal, and Australia. Notably, Jonathan had Appium perform as instruments in a band and Dan Cuellar put together a fun Appium video montage for Selenium Conference.

Early in 2013  Android and Selendroid support was released, making Appium the first truly cross-platform automation framework. 

Appium began to grow and mature significantly. In May 2014, Appium 1.0 was released, which stood as a milestone in Appium's development. Appium was given various awards and became the most popular open-source cross-platform mobile automation framework. Stability improved, bugs were prioritized and fixed, and features added. Appium won the 2014 Bossie award of InfoWorld about the best open source desktop and mobile software. Appium was also selected as an Open Source Rookie of the Year by Black Duck Software.

Eventually, it became clear that the Appium codebase was not optimized for a large team of distributed, sometime contributors. Appium was rewritten from the ground up, using a more modern version of the JavaScript language, and redoing Appium's architecture so that it was easy for users or third-party developers to build their own Appium drivers.

In late 2016, Sauce Labs donated Appium as a project to the JS Foundation, in order to cement for the world Sauce's commitment that Appium remains open source.  In October 2016, Appium joined the JS Foundation. Initially as a mentor program, it graduated in August 2017.

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