Spectra Blog
Practical mobile QA: locators, Appium, Android and iOS inspection, and what we learn building Spectra.
-
engineering · · 7 min read
What Spectra is, how it's built, and how it compares to Appium Inspector
Spectra is a native mobile UI inspector for Android and iOS. Here is the problem behind it, the architecture, the feature list, and an honest comparison.
-
guides · · 7 min read
Why your mobile XPath breaks: a practical ranking of locator strategies for Android, iOS and Flutter
A ranked guide to mobile locators (accessibility ID, resource-id, text, iOS predicate and class chain, XPath, Flutter keys) with before/after examples.
-
changelog · · 4 min read
Spectra 1.2.4 and the road here: what shipped in 2026 so far
A plain summary of Spectra releases 1.0 through 1.2.4: what landed, what was fixed, what is free and what is Pro, sourced from the release notes.
-
engineering · · 7 min read
Why uiautomator dump fails with "could not get idle state" (and 4 ways around it)
What the idle-state error in uiautomator dump actually means, why spinners trigger it, and four fixes with real adb and Appium settings.