UI Inspector

Inspect and debug mobile app UIs from inside Visual Studio — on a local Appium server, or on a BrowserStack App Automate session.

What it does

• Attach to a running session. Point it at a local Appium server or pick a running BrowserStack session, and work against the session your test is already driving rather than starting a new one.
• Walk the element tree. Tap, inspect attributes, and copy selectors for the element under the cursor.
• Replay a finished run. For a BrowserStack session that has ended, the video and the Appium server log are enough to recover the element tree as it was at each point, so a failure can be inspected after the fact.
• Keep credentials out of the repo. BrowserStack credentials are stored with Windows DPAPI under your user account, not in project files.

The engine runs as a local process on the loopback interface behind a per-session token; nothing is exposed to the network.

Getting started

Open it from View ▸ Other Windows ▸ UI Inspector, or Tools ▸ UI Inspector. For BrowserStack, enter your username and access key once when prompted. For a local Appium server, give it the server URL — the default is http://127.0.0.1:4723/wd/hub. If nothing is listening there, Start server runs Appium for you on loopback and stops it again when Visual Studio closes.

Requirements

• Visual Studio 2022 or 2026
• The WebView2 runtime, which ships with Visual Studio
• For local inspection, Appium 2 or 3 on your PATH (npm install -g appium)
• For BrowserStack, an App Automate subscription

Licensing

UI Inspector runs free for 30 days from first use. After that it asks for a licence code, which you enter once under Settings. Nothing is sent anywhere to check it — the code is verified on your own machine, offline.

To get a code, ask on the Q & A tab of this listing and you will be sent one.

Status

This is an early release. The element tree, selector copying and session attach are built against Appium 2 and the BrowserStack App Automate API. Please report problems with a session id and the relevant log lines.