iOS App Settings

iOS App Settings are the permissions or preferences that can be enabled/disabled for an app through iOS settings. Accessing the device settings is restricted on the iOS public cloud devices of LambdaTest due to security constraints. However, in multiple cases, the native app must be tested for various permissions which can only be enabled and disabled with the settings app.

This document will guide you on how to access and use iOS settings for App Automation session.

note

This feature is supported only on iOS 14 and above devices.

How to use iOS app settings in App Automation

To make it easier for the user to access the iOS app settings, we have created a lambda-hook. This web-hook supports the opening and manipulation of the settings.

The hook "lambda-ios-settings" takes a JSON parameter which tells which settings we need to manipulate. Below shown is an example of the lambda hook written in python3.

params = {"Permission Settings":{"Camera":"Off", "Location":"While using the app"},"Reset App":"On","Next Page":{"Child Toggle":"On"},"Others":"White","Slider-1":"0.1", "TextField-2":"ABCD", "TextField-1":"XYZ"}
driver.execute_script("lambda-ios-settings", params)

If you look at the code snippet above you can see params which contains the JSON object for manipulating the iOS app settings. This JSON object contains Permission settings. Let’s learn more about that.

iOS app settings Supported by Lambda Hook

App-specific permission settings

The permission settings are available in the OS and changed through permissions provided by the user.

Supported permission settings

Currently, App Automate supports the following permission settings:

Camera
Contacts
Photos
Notifications
Location
Precise Location

One important thing to remember while handling Permission Settings is that, we have to first take action on the Permission Pop ups from the app when they appear and then only those particular Permission Settings will be reflected in the app settings page. For example:

Let's say we pass Camera: "On" in the lambda hook’s preferences even before handling Camera’s permission popup from the app, the Camera key would be missing on the app settings page which would result in failure. So we have to be sure that we have handled the permission pop ups before calling lambda hook.

info

Note that we have separate key for Precise Location. We do not pass it inside Location object as shown:

params = {"Permission Settings":{"Location":"While using the app", "Precise Location": "On"}}

Custom App Settings

These are the settings added by the app developer using the iOS Settings Bundle.

Supported custom settings

Currently, App Automate supports the following custom settings:

Toggles
Multivalued Settings
Nested Settings
Sliders
Textfields

Apart from Textfields and Sliders, for every other settings, we have to pass the Name of that particular setting as the key-value pair. For example:

"Reset App" : "On".

For textfields and sliders, we pass the index of that particular textfield or slider starting from 1 when we traverse from top to bottom. For example:

"Slider-1":"0.1",
"TextField-2":"ABCD"

The values in Slider are entered on a scale from 0-1 which means the values are not integers but decimals.

If any key is not present, we should get an error saying one of the keys is missing in the passed preferences.

Remember

The title of the keys displayed on your iOS app settings page must be unique.

iOS App Settings

How to use iOS app settings in App Automation