Once the drivers are decoupled from Appium, it's quite an obvious question to ask: what's special about these drivers, anyway? Why couldn't anyone else create a driver for their own platform? Well with Appium 2.0, they can, and they should! By using any existing Appium drivers as a template, anyone can create their own custom drivers with a minimum of extra code. It also makes it possible to freely update drivers independently of Appium and of one another, so that you can get the latest changes for one driver while sticking with a known stable version of another driver, for example. This decreases the size of an Appium install dramatically and makes it so that you don't need to install drivers that you don't need to use. With Appium 2.0, the code for these drivers will no longer be bundled with the main Appium server. They really ought to be developed as independent projects that implement the same interface and can be used equivalently with the Appium server. Decouple the drivers! Appium's platform drivers (the XCUITest driver, UiAutomator2 driver, Espresso driver, etc.) have very little in common with one another.If you've been around the Appium world for a while, you've probably heard that Appium 2.0 has been 'coming soon' for a very long time! I'm happy to report that work on it has been progressing well, and Appium 2.0 is now ready to use as a beta! Check out: Migrating to Appium 2.0(Part 1) - Capability Prefixes Appium 2.0's visionīefore we get into the details of installing and running Appium 2.0, it's worth mentioning some of the core goals for this next major revision of Appium:

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