WeTest.Athens 2026

Have you ever had that moment when mobile automation with Appium makes you question your life choices?

You can automate the web, you understand HTML, you know your way around selectors. So you open a native app and expect the same rules to apply. Then the first swipe fails. The selector that looked perfect stops working. The test gets slow. The logs look like noise. And suddenly Appium feels flaky.

But the truth is simple. Your tests are not failing because Appium is unreliable. They fail because YOU ARE doing it wrong. Native apps are not HTML, and treating them like they are will always backfire.

We will unpack what you are really interacting with when you automate a native app, how Appium bridges the gap through platform drivers, and why things like UI hierarchies, element attributes, and locator choices behave differently on Android and iOS. You will see the most common web assumptions people bring into native automation, why they create frustration, and how to replace them with a mental model that makes your tests faster, more stable, and easier to debug.

No live coding, hopefully just clear examples, sharp insights, and a new way of thinking about mobile automation.