Automation Happy Hour 8: YouMail, Part 1

Code samples for Automation Happy Hour are available at github.com/appium-pro/ahh

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YouMail is one of my favorite new apps (though I learned on the stream that it's been around for almost 12 years!). It acts as a replacement for your carrier's voicemail system, and does things like voicemail transcription and filtering out known scam calls. This week, I was all set and excited to try to automate an end-to-end flow involving a phone call, a voicemail, and an assertion on YouMail's transcription. Unfortunately I ran into a lot of roadblocks and a sort of catch-22. My personal iOS device, which runs YouMail, is on an iOS version which it turns out is too new for the Xcode on my machine to handle. I usually run Appium tests on a separate test device, but this device doesn't have a sim can't so it can't usefully run YouMail. And, even less fortunately for me, it looks like upgrading Xcode on my machine will involve updating to Catalina (something I have been avoiding based on the experience of others).

Still, despite that system failure, we did see something interesting, which is that I prepared an integration with the Twilio API in order to generate calls and leave voicemails on arbitrary phone numbers. With this really useful API, we were able to show how it's possible to test the entire end-to-end stack of a phone-based application. All the Twilio code is in the video and up at the repo, so go check that out!