This issue will be used to keep track of issues related to Appium 3.

We see Appium 3 as more of an evolution of Appium 2, rather than a complete overhaul. It will keep the same architecture as Appium 2, but we want to clean up some older code and update various dependencies (such as dropping old NodeJS versions, bumping up Express version to 5, and so on). Each driver such as UIA2/XCUITest etc will keep their responsibility in their repositories, so their functionalities won't be affected by this change.

Working branch: https://github.com/appium/appium/tree/appium3

Items

Dev Process

• Create Appium 3 branch and npm channel
  • https://github.com/appium/appium/tree/appium3
  • Update beta channel
• Umbrella drivers
  • Select a primary driver to check Appium 3 compatibility, to avoid keeping track of multiple release channels in multiple drivers
    • XCUITest driver - Android-related drivers require more changes (Androiddriver + UiA2 driver), so they will be the next target
  • Other drivers after that
  • Not directly related, but related to the deprecations
    • chore: add deprecated marks in lib/method-map.js appium-xcuitest-driver#2554

Functionality

• Support NodeJS 20+ (npm 10+) (NodeJS v18 will be EOL in April 2025)
  • chore: configure monorepo for appium3 #20790
• Dependency changes
  • Express v5 - fix(base-driver): Make it work with Express5 #20789
  • Drop validate.js - feat(base-driver): Remove dependency to validate.js #21175
• Drop driver-specific handling from the main core
  • feat(base-driver): Drop the unzip logic from basedriver helpers #21105
• Drop old deprecated non-w3c endpoints
  • feat: add /appium/sessions, /session/:sessionId/appium/capabilities and deprecated marks will be removed in the future #20936 (add deprecated marks)
  • feat(base-driver): Remove deprecated routes #21134
  • feat(appium): implement GET /appium/sessions and deprecate GET /sessions #21233
  • Adjust drivers & Inspector to not use the old endpoints
• Make security flags driver-specific to prevent unwanted reuse by other drivers/plugins
  • feat(base-driver): Allow to prefix feature names with automation names #20793
  • fix(base-driver): add * always for non-separator for backward compatibility #20821
  • feat(base-driver): Make extension name prefix mandatory #21110
• Better Appium Inspector integration
  • 💡 feat: replace non-W3C endpoints used in Inspector #20880
  • 💡 feat: add new driver endpoints to retrieve available commands and extensions #20881
  • 💡 feat: make appium-inspector available as a plugin #20834 (sync with Appium 3 for marketing purposes)
    • feat(appium): add inspector in preset plugin #21114
• Create migration guide for the above changes
  • docs: add Appium 3 migration guide #21174

Drop/Low Priority

• Switch node.http to node.http2 for Express, get rid of the third-party spdy dependency
  • Cannot do this yet since Express v5 still doesn't support it
• Investigate the possibility of moving to ESM
  • This is not so beneficial right now. We would need to update a lot of tests to achieve this, so this would depend on our capacity

RC Target

• April 2025 (by following NodeJS v18 EOL)

Concerns

• How to treat backward compatibility AFTER releasing Appium 3 RC?
  • The worst case is if Appium 3 based modules (especially base-driver) have no compatibility with Appium 2. Should we somehow keep Appium 2 backward compatibility for individual drivers? etc.