If you have ever written mobile end-to-end tests, you probably know the routine. You set up Appium, fight with drivers and capabilities, write a test that passes locally, and then watch it fail in CI because an animation took 200ms longer than expected. You add a sleep(2) . Then another. Six months later nobody trusts the suite.

Maestro is an open-source framework built to make that experience less painful. This article covers what it is, how it works, what you should know before adopting it, and how it stacks up against the other free and paid options.

This is Part 1 of a two-part series. Part 2 is a hands-on deep dive with a small SwiftUI app and a complete test suite.

What is Maestro?

Maestro is a UI and end-to-end testing framework for Android, iOS and web apps.…