Is paid Apple Developer Account needed to run Selenium Appium Automation tests on real apple devices like iPhone or iPads?

Question

So I am working on a project which comprises of the software web application, built on Python 3.7.

Currently, it supports pc and mac platforms only with various browsers, and we have automated it using Python-Selenium-Behave.

Now, we are making this application mobile responsive so that it can work on Android as well as iOS platforms, primary tablets in their native browsers (Android-Chrome, Apple-Safari). To automate it, we have updated our framework to work with Python-Selenium-Behave-Appium.

Problem is, we are able to run tests on virtual devices using Android Studio and Xcode. But when we try to run them on real devices (Apple iPad/iPhone) then we are getting the error that "Apple Team ID is required".

I have researched over the internet and found that we'd have to enroll ourselves in Apple Developer Account (Paid - $99/Year) to get the Apple Team ID!

So in a nutshell, the question is, "Do we need to enroll ourself in Apple Developer Paid Account with $99/year so that we can run our selenium-appium automation tests on real Apple Devices?"

Answer 1

Yes, you need apple developer ID , to build and deploy your project using Xcode on your real iOS device.

Answer 2

If you are building and testing iOS apps someone within the project has to have a developer account, not? Just ask them for the xcodeOrgId and xcodeSigningId, as described in the documentation: http://appium.io/docs/en/drivers/ios-xcuitest-real-devices/

Not everyone (e.g. tester/devs) needs an account to run the tests, but you need atleast one person with an account in your project to publish it anyways. Maybe the client can provide the Id's.

So in a nutshell, yes, you need someone with a PAID dev account. :)