AndroidDriver returns empty element text/value with appium java-client 8.1.1

[dawsze]

Description

I've just upgraded appium java-client from 7.6.0 to 8.1.1. Tests on AndroidDriver cannot get proper element value or text (element.getAttribute("value") | element.getText()). These methods returns only empty values. IOSDriver works fine.

Moreover if I change AndroidDriver to RemoteWebdriver everything is back to normal and methods returns proper element text/value.

Tested on:

• Huawei P9 Lite 2017 (Android 7.0, EMUI 5.0) - Real Device
• Huawei P10 Lite (Android 7.0, EMUI 5.1) - Real Device
• Samsung S22 Ultra (Android 12) - Real Device (BrowserStack)
• Samsung A51 (Android 10) - Real Device (BrowserStack)

Environment

• Java client build version or git revision if you use some snapshot: 8.1.1
• Appium server version or git revision if you use some snapshot: 1.22.3 (Started by CLI)
• Desktop OS/version used to run Appium (Server): MacOS Monterey 12.4
• npm version: 8.9.0
• Node.js version: v18.2.0

Code To Reproduce Issue [ Good To Have ]

TestClass: https://gist.github.com/dawsze/0b87efd7cb8ab3a3b6db86af3bd3493e

pom.xml: https://gist.github.com/dawsze/43cb5c93237f88c1164528c6840b35d9

Exception Stacktraces

https://gist.github.com/dawsze/0684f0fd0566db315de5d9c096287998

Link To Appium Logs

https://gist.github.com/dawsze/893a277714e9b9d3339268f620b39d05

[mykola-mokhnach]

Moreover if I change AndroidDriver to RemoteWebdriver everything is back to normal and methods returns proper element text/value.

Please provide the server log you get while using vanilla RemoteWebDriver (and returning the expected value). I assume there might be a difference between Chromedriver working in JWP and W3C protocols.

[dawsze]

Server log: https://gist.github.com/dawsze/4781ed948ab629201c39157e86a9de18

[mykola-mokhnach]

I can observe that the previous client version was passing some hacky javascript () in order to fetch the element value while the current one simply calls the corresponding chromedriver endpoint. From my perspective the latter one is the correct approach and if no value is returned then it must be reported as chromedriver issue. In the worst case you could just copy that hacky script and use it in your code to mimic the legacy behaviour.

[dawsze]

Found this ticket at chromedrivers community: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromedriver/issues/detail?id=3820 but i don't know it's related with my issue.

Anyway, reffering to comments, I changed UiAutomator2Options to ChromeOptions and set two additional capabilities:

• setExperimentalOption("w3c",false);
• setBrowserVersion("");

which seems to work as workaround.

Does this change may affect to any others code parts in whole project? (I mean appiums may work in strange ways in example) I've done few simple tests and all did pass but I have few "big" projects which relate to each other so test it all may took a time

[mykola-mokhnach]

Appium works as a simple proxy in case of chromedriver. We don't try to add any logic on top of that functionality. IMHO disabling W3C mode might work as a temporary workaround, but in the longer perspective JWP protocol will be completely deprecated.