This is just out of curiosity and cluelessness about the implementation of the method, I was going through the appium server logs for the java code :
driver.swipe()
Server Logs read :
info: [debug] [BOOTSTRAP] [debug] Swiping from [x=540.0, y=1066.0] to [x=540.0, y=710.0] with steps: 22
What are the 22 steps here??
Steps are internal swipe option and calculated from the duration you had provided to perform swipe. It indicates in how many steps the swipe action should be completed. In your example the entire swipe action get completed with 22 small swipe steps. if you provide duration to 0 you may found with steps: 0 instead of steps:22. For instance,
info: [debug] [BOOTSTRAP] [debug] Swiping from [x=540.0, y=1066.0] to [x=540.0, y=710.0] with steps: 0
Step are calculated based on the duration you specified for the swipe
Math.round(duration * swipeStepsPerSec)
Per second swipe steps are defined as
const swipeStepsPerSec = 28;
so if you had provided swipe duration of 1sec total steps will became 28. You can refer appium android driver code here.