I am using Selenium and Appium to test WebApps across various browsers and platforms, including Windows, Apple (Mac, iPad, iPhone) and Android. Recently, Selenium and Appium on Apple have hit a blocking defect, reported here: Selenium tests broken by recent update of safari to version 13?. These were traced to underlying WebKit issues. No sign so far of anyone doing anything about this - it means all test Apple devices must remain un-updated until a fix or workaround becomes available. Clearly, not a situation that could be tolerated for too long (as users auto-update and get Safari v13.x).
With this in mind, I'd like to ask: Would anyone like to recommend open source or free alternatives to Selenium and Appium that offer similar functionality and work across all major platforms/browsers? Ideally frameworks that work with Python (but could also consider JavaScript and Java).
Apple commonly does this with regards to both Selenium and Appium. A while back, with the iOS 10(or so) update, they deprecated a bunch of code that was being used by Appium in automating iOS applications. This was done in favor of moving developers and testers to their own automation tool XCTest, which is native to XCode.
iOS Automated Tests - XCTest vs Appium
XCTest will be a much better option for automating iOS browsers and applications than Appium.
I don't have a great recommendation for non-mobile Safari.