Cross-platform tooling & testing

The canonical action is upload_to_testflight, better known by its alias pilot. It takes a finished iOS binary, an App Store Connect credential and an optional changelog, and hands the build to Apple's beta service. Android has no core equivalent.

A lane is a named, ordered sequence of fastlane actions declared in the Fastfile. CI invokes one by name, such as fastlane ios beta for a lane inside a platform ios block, and the lane's exit status decides the step.

fastlane's build_app action, whose alias is gym, wraps Apple's xcodebuild for iOS: it archives the scheme you name, then exports a signed .ipa plus the archive's dSYM debug-symbol bundles into an output directory.

fastlane captures iOS store screenshots with capture_ios_screenshots, better known as snapshot, which drives an XCUITest on simulators; Android uses capture_android_screenshots, known as screengrab, which drives a separate instrumentation test APK on a device or emulator.

Apple and Google use different credentials. upload_to_app_store takes an App Store Connect API key through api_key or api_key_path; upload_to_play_store takes a Google service-account JSON key through json_key or json_key_data. There is no shared credential model.

On Android the UiAutomator2 driver exposes mobile: acceptAlert and mobile: dismissAlert; on iOS the XCUITest driver exposes mobile: alert, and only iOS also has the appium:autoAcceptAlerts capability that handles alerts without a call.

Sending browserName instead of an application makes the phone's own browser the app under test: Chrome on Android, whose page commands a Chromedriver answers, and Safari on iOS, driven by XCUITest through Apple's remote web inspector.

Both platforms share the WEBVIEW_ prefix and then diverge: Android appends the package name of the process hosting the web view, while iOS appends a numeric page id that the remote debugger assigns at runtime.

Both sides share mobile: activateApp to foreground an app, mobile: backgroundApp to suspend it, mobile: terminateApp to stop it and mobile: queryAppState to check it. Android adds mobile: startActivity; Apple platforms add mobile: launchApp and mobile: killApp.

It tells the Android drivers to grant every permission the app declares as part of installing it, so no runtime prompt ever appears. It is an install-time switch decided at session start, and the XCUITest driver has no equivalent.