Open Radar

 
The UIAutomation framework is incredibly powerful, and opens up really
exciting possibilities for real UI level acceptance testing on iOS.
However, the current implementation is crippled by the fact that the
framework is hidden away behind a layer of Javascript, and interacting
with the framework requires you to jump to Instruments, forcing the
developer to switch mental contexts. Some great people have tried to
rectify this by creating frameworks that wrap UIAutomation, such as
Bwoken[1].  And there have been some proof-of-concept attempts to open
the framework to developers, such as PublicAutomation[2], which is
currently being used by Frank[3] to bring the acceptance testing
techniques used by the Ruby community to iOS.

These frameworks are a step in the right direction, but if
UIAutomation.framework were to be made public, the possibilities would
be endless. Creating acceptance tests that run from inside an XCTest
suite would be trivial to write, and we would have a much more
comprehensive test suite to work with, leading to fewer bugs and
better apps.

Given the recent improvements made to unit testing in Xcode 5, and the
introduction of XCTest, I would love to see this framework made public
for developers to take advantage of so that we can test our
applications more thoroughly.

[1]: http://bendyworks.github.io/bwoken/
[2]: https://github.com/moredip/PublicAutomation
[3]: http://www.testingwithfrank.com/