Swipe gestures with selenium on Android devices

Testing swipe gestures on android devices is not easy. I will show you how it can be done in this blog post.

See the following example for swiping from left to right:

import io.appium.java_client.android.AndroidDriver;

import static io.appium.java_client.touch.WaitOptions.waitOptions;
import static io.appium.java_client.touch.offset.PointOption.point;
import static java.time.Duration.ofMillis;

public class Test {

    public void swipeLeftToRight(AndroidDriver<?> androidDriver) {

        var currentContext = androidDriver.getContext();

        // We need to switch to the native context to get the real windows size
        androidDriver.context("NATIVE_APP");
        var windowsSize = androidDriver.manage().window().getSize();

        // Avoid starting and ending directly on the edge of the screen
        int border = 50;

        int startX =  border;
        int startY = (windowsSize.height / 2);

        int endX = windowsSize.width - border;
        int endY = startY;

        new TouchAction(androidDriver)
                .press(point(startX, startY))
                .waitAction(waitOptions(ofMillis(2000)))
                .moveTo(point(endX, endY))
                .release()
                .perform();

        // Switch back to the web context
        androidDriver.context(currentContext);
    }
}

This example just swipes horizontal from left to right over the whole screen. If you need to swipe over a more precise postition (e.g. over a web element), you need to convert the position of the web element to the native screen size. That depends on you kind of screen and on the positiotn and size of the web view.