A few years ago, I implemented UI automatic tests on a bunch of iOS apps. The Apple go-to framework was UIAutomation. It was a pretty good tool for this job, albeit limited.

What I liked a lot was that the framework relied upon accessibility. To automate the testing of an app, you firstly had to make sure that the app was really accessible and then you could built upon accessibility attributes to add automatic testing.

I found it very smart because developers were incentivized to make their app accessible. Accessibility was, in a way, a tool to describe semantically a UI, so a screen reader, a test framework, the OS could understand how the UI was structured and acted upon.

One of my (really) old post about UIAutomation: http://blog.manbolo.com/2012/04/08/ios-automated-tests-with-...