Detox: Tackling the Flakiness of Mobile Automation
summary
Wix replaces Appium after two years and eight months with Detox, a cross-platform iOS and Android grey‑box automation library that runs hundreds of tests running in CI and communicates with apps over WebSocket. Detox auto‑synchronizes by tracking main thread network and animations, so tests avoid brittle sleep calls, support multi‑simulator parallel runs, allow selective sync disabling for animated or upload screens, and yield a practical ~80–90% confidence for production end‑to‑end flows.
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chapters (26)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:05What is React Native?
- 2:42Terminology
- 3:36The Bridge
- 7:15Unit Tests
- 9:15Production E2E
- 10:10E2E Flakiness
- 11:38What is Detox?
- 12:22Detox is...
- 13:06Black Box vs Gray Box A method of testing stuff from the outside, without knowing what's going on internally
- 14:25Gray Box Sync
- 14:58Two Running Parts
- 15:44Device Configurations
- 17:22Just Simply Run
- 17:37detox Object
- 18:07detox.beforeEach()
- 19:05detox.cleanup
- 19:18device Object
- 19:32device Object Functions
- 22:11What are they for?
- 24:54Advanced Matchers
- 25:25Actions
- 26:40Expectations?
- 27:15Synchronization
- 28:49waitfor()
- 30:11Demo
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