iOS Automation Testing: Best Practices & Top Frameworks

Introduction

iOS automation testing involves testing applications that are made for iOS devices only. Testing applications, in general, requires the tester to understand the purpose of the application, its technical requirements, and performance metrics to compare the expected behavior versus the actual behavior. The iOS family is a closed environment that is licensed to operate on Apple devices only. This makes it easier to test the application across the device range as opposed to Android applications that can be deployed into a much larger array of devices.

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The iOS application needs to be tested both manually and using automation scripts. Bugs are inevitable in any application despite thoughtful designing. iOS automation testing is just as important as testing any application whether it is on iOS or Android platforms. Quality assurance activities must be performed right from the beginning of the application lifecycle. In iOS applications, since the devices are known, and the OS updates are well-planned, it is more convenient to perform testing on these devices. Automated testing on iOS applications has a multitude of benefits. Running automated test scripts helps save time and effort as it allows one test to run in parallel across multiple devices.

How is iOS Automation Testing Implemented?

An iOS application needs to be tested not only for its functionality but its UI/UX design too. The test cases must be applied to the various iDevices – viz, iPhone, iPad, iPad mini, iPad Pro, Apple Watch, Apple TV, iMac (of various screen sizes), iPod Touch, Macbooks, etc. – to ensure the UI/UX is being implemented as expected on devices of varied resolutions. Apart from testing on the array of devices where the application will be deployed, as a tester, you would also require to test out the application from every angle. Some other types of testing that are essential include unit testing, functional testing, visual UI testing, as well as end-to-end testing. Let’s take a moment to look at each type of testing:

1. Unit Testing: Unit testing is most often conducted by the developer itself. Unit tests are performed to confirm whether the source code of any specific section works as per the requirements, in isolation. This testing is done individually on a piece of code that the developer had developed once he merged his work into the application’s source code. The most common framework for performing unit tests is Apple’s XCTest, available within the XCode development environment, which offers iOS automation testing capabilities, as well.
2. Functional Testing: The process of testing all the functionalities thoroughly without prior knowledge of the source code is known as functionality testing. On iOS devices, we need to be cognizant of the haptic functionalities, such as soft-touch, 3D touch, taps, shakes, and rotations, etc. These inputs need to be considered when performing functional testing of the iOS application on various compatible devices. These test cases can be written manually, and later, to be automated into automation test scripts, so that the functionalities can be tested in every version release of the application and as part of regression testing as well. KIF (Keep It Functional), XCode UI Test, EarlGrey, and Calabash are some of the iOS automation testing tools supported by Apple for functional testing. We will learn more about these tools further in the article.
3. UI/UX Testing: One of the most important parts of iOS testing is the user interface and experience. The application’s user interface must function as expected when the following actions are performed. We can categorize the different aspects of UI testing as:Inputs: The inputs include soft touch, scrolling, long touch/3D touch, and buttons. Each of these inputs would perform specific functions which need to be tested meticulously. The buttons on the screen may differ in size, position, color, and font. Screen: The screen orientation of the application must be tested on its compatible devices. Screen UI testing must also include the screen resolution changes and adaptability according to the device. Soft Keyboard: The option to hide or use the keyboard which comprises emoji and symbols tabs is important to include and test. Hard Keys: Some applications also link with the physical buttons such as the power, home, and volume buttons. These hard keys play a major role in UI/UX testing as they provide accessibility and comfort for the user. Lists: Unlike its Android counterparts, iOS handles pop-ups differently. In iOS applications, lists are displayed when options need to be chosen instead of pop-ups. Testing iOS UI/UX is considerably different from testing those in Android applications. Owing to Apple’s closed ecosystem, the behavior and expectation of its devices are limited, which makes for a predictable testing process. Automating UI/UX testing for an iOS application can be done by utilizing XCUITest, which is baked right into Xcode and IDE environment and is restrictive to Objective C or Swift languages, or leveraging Appium automation framework that allows flexibility in which programming language and additional tools you see fit for your iOS automation testing.
4. Regression and End-to-End TestingiOS applications undergo multiple changes, bug fixes, and versions of releases. Throughout the lifetime of the application, the changes introduced to the application could affect the existing features of the application. For this reason, testers must perform regression testing making sure that the existing functionalities are working as expected, despite the changes made. Regression tests must be performed during each version release of the application. The QA team, in general, would prefer to automate these test scenarios due to their repetitive nature. Automating them can save the QA team, time, and effort allowing them to use their focus on writing and automating test cases for the new changes that will become part of the regression test suite in the next release. On the other hand, we have end-to-end testing where the application stack is tested completely from beginning to end. Here, we simulate the entire user experience from front-end UI/UX to backend server features and other network-related aspects. It is a part of integration testing where we can test if all the functionalities work in conjunction with one another, as expected. In cases like these, simulators are used to automate the end-to-end test scenarios if testing on the actual devices or all the compatible devices is not feasible. However, it is best practice to perform regression and end-to-end testing on real devices as it promotes confidence in testing as if the device was in a user’s hand. By utilizing iOS automation testing frameworks mentioned above (and later to be discussed), a quality engineer can achieve automated regression and end-to-end suites.

What to automate, and what to leave to a person

Automating everything is neither achievable nor desirable. The cases that repay automation are stable, repeatable and objective; the cases that do not are the ones where a human judgement is the actual output. Getting this split wrong is the most common reason an iOS suite is quietly abandoned a year in.

Test type	Automate?	Why
Core user flows — login, checkout, key feature paths	Yes	Run on every build, deterministic, and the most expensive things to break
Regression suite	Yes	Repetitive by definition, and the reason regression testing gets skipped when it is manual
API and integration checks	Yes	Fast, stable, and catch breakage before it reaches the UI
Compatibility across device and OS combinations	Yes	The combinatorics are the whole problem; parallel execution is the whole answer
Performance baselines	Yes, on real devices	Only meaningful when measured repeatedly against the same hardware
Exploratory testing of a new feature	No	The value is in the tester noticing what nobody specified
Visual design and layout judgement	Partly	Automated visual comparison catches unintended change; whether the result looks right is a human call
Usability and flow assessment	No	Confusion is not something a script can assert on
Rare, high-impact edge cases	Usually not	Maintenance cost per run is high and the scenarios change faster than the tests

Challenges Faced in iOS Automation Testing

Having tight schedules for release is not uncommon when developing iOS applications. This gives the QA team less time to integrate the multitude of features that the application performs or to create new test scripts.

With the introduction of face-ID and fingerprint authentication methods, it can be harder to automate most of the test cases. Manual intervention is deemed necessary in such cases. It can be hard to automate the environments of dynamic carrier network conditions and related background processes which requires specialized expertise.

That said, biometric flows are less of a dead end than they first appear, and it is worth separating the parts.

• On the simulator, biometrics are fully controllable. The Simulator’s Features menu lets you enrol a Face ID or Touch ID identity and then send a matching or non-matching result on demand, which covers the success path, the failure path and the fallback-to-passcode path in an automated run.
• On real hardware, you cannot present a face or a fingerprint from a script. What you can automate is everything either side of the prompt: that the prompt appears when it should, that a cancelled prompt falls back to the passcode or password path, and that a failed authentication leaves the app in the right state.
• The pattern most teams settle on is a launch argument that puts the app into a test mode where the authentication layer is stubbed, so the flows behind the login are testable end to end, while the biometric prompt itself gets a small number of manual checks on real devices before release.
• Face ID and Touch ID are among the things a simulator genuinely cannot reproduce, alongside the camera, GPU pressure, battery behaviour and real network radio conditions. That is the argument for real devices at the sign-off stage, not just at the debugging stage.
• Compressed release schedules — the existing paragraph on tight schedules leaving the QA team little time to build test scripts.
• Biometric authentication and network conditions — the existing Face ID and carrier-network paragraph, with addition 8 appended.
• Debugging time and lab access — the existing paragraph on troubleshooting the test code and the absence of an adequate mobile testing lab.
• A thinner tooling landscape than the web — the existing paragraph comparing mobile automation frameworks with web ones.

Some other challenges faced in automating iOS application testing include troubleshooting and debugging the test code due to lack of time. The absence of an adequate mobile testing lab can also prove arduous.

On top of that, the automation framework solutions for iOS automation testing, and for mobile application testing in general, is minimal compared to various frameworks and solutions provided for web applications.

Best Practices for iOS Testing

Real devices over Emulators/Simulators:

When it comes to UI/UX testing, we are required to test the application on all the compatible devices, but it can get quite expensive for executing tests on all the devices. This is where emulators or simulators come into play. Apart from the cost perspective, there is also the matter of debugging the application step-by-step which is not as easy to spot when testing with real devices.

On the contrary, the processing speed of testing with a real device can be quicker than working with emulators/simulators. Reliability plays a major role here, as well. Real devices can be more reliable when compared to emulators/simulators since simulating all kinds of user interactions can be tedious.

Although emulators and simulators are easily attainable to spin up, they cannot quite capture the scenarios where the device’s battery or storage is low or when the flow is interrupted by calls or notifications. In such instances, manually testing with real devices can be more satisfactory. Additionally, as mentioned above, real devices are preferable in executing regression and end-to-end testing to simulate a user’s actions as close as possible.

Set accessibility identifiers before you write the tests

Every iOS automation framework worth using — XCUITest directly, Appium and Detox through it — finds elements through the accessibility layer, the same layer that powers VoiceOver. That leaves you a choice about what your tests anchor to. If developers set an explicit accessibility identifier on each interactive element, tests query a stable string that nobody changes by accident. If they do not, tests fall back to matching visible labels or walking the view hierarchy, and both of those move the moment someone edits copy, ships a localisation, or refactors a stack view.

The distinction that trips teams up is identifier versus label. The accessibility label is user-facing text read aloud by VoiceOver, and it gets translated. The accessibility identifier is invisible to users, is never localised, and exists precisely so automation has something dependable to hold on to. Tests should query the identifier.

• Make identifier assignment a developer task, not a QA task. It belongs in the definition of done for any UI component, alongside the component itself. Retrofitting identifiers across an existing app after the tests are already brittle is far more expensive than adding them as you go.
• Name them for what the element does, not where it sits. loginSubmitButton survives a redesign; bottomRightButton does not.
• Use Xcode’s Accessibility Inspector against a running build to see what is already exposed before you start adding anything — apps that were built with accessibility in mind often have more usable identifiers than the team expects.
• Treat a test that needs an XPath expression as a defect report against the app, not a clever workaround. It means an element has no identifier, and the test will break on the next UI change.

The side effect is worth stating: an app instrumented well enough to automate reliably is also an app that works properly with VoiceOver. The work you do here pays into accessibility compliance as well as test stability.

Rich reporting and Communication:

When it comes to application testing, taking screenshots or recording the screen for every step or action can be crucial in debugging and understanding the application’s actual behavior. On iOS devices, screenshots can be taken manually by pressing the power and home buttons together on older devices and pressing the power and volume up buttons on the latest devices. To record the screen, we can use QuickTime to record the iOS device screen, provided it is connected to a Mac machine using a lightning cable. Some tools offer automated screenshots and screen recordings, such as fastlane, which uses XCUITest to take screenshots. Additionally, there are iOS automation testing frameworks that also deliver rich reporting and communication during your automation and testing efforts.

For the Rich reporting subsection: Where this pays off is over time rather than in a single run. A platform that retains the full session — video, device logs, network activity and screenshots — lets you pull up a specific failure weeks later and compare app quality trends across release cycles, rather than re-running the suite and hoping the failure reappears. Kobiton’s Session Explorer keeps every session available for exactly that.

Crash and Console Logs:

Crash logs are used to understand the root cause in case of application failure. In such instances, you need to catch the crash logs. The following steps can be taken to capture the crash logs:

Both are available through Xcode without installing anything else.

1. Connect the device to your Mac and trust the computer when prompted. Current iPhones and iPads use USB-C; models from before 2022 use Lightning.
2. In Xcode, open Window then Devices and Simulators, and select your device in the sidebar.
3. Choose View Device Logs for crash reports. Each entry is named after the process that crashed, so filter on your app’s name to find yours, and use Open in Finder if you need to attach the file to a bug ticket.
4. Choose Open Console for live console output, or use the macOS Console app and pick the device from its sidebar. Filter by process to cut the system noise down to your app.
5. For simulators, xcrun simctl spawn booted log stream gives you the same stream from the command line, which is the version you want in a CI job.

For screenshots and recordings, current iPhones capture a screenshot with the side button and volume up together, and iOS records the screen natively through Control Centre. On a connected Mac, QuickTime Player can record the device screen through File then New Movie Recording. In an automated suite you rarely want either: XCUITest can attach a screenshot to the test result itself, so the evidence arrives with the failure rather than having to be captured by hand afterwards.

Console logs, on the other hand, display the complete information of the AUT (application under test) on the iOS device. To view the console logs, you will need to use the iTools application. Once you’ve downloaded the application, connect the device to the system where the iTools application is running and click on the Toolbox icon. The last step is to click on the Real-Time Log button which displays the console log.

SetUp and TearDown methods in iOS Automation Testing Frameworks:

In some frameworks like XCTest and Appium, we can use SetUp and TearDown methods to customize the state of the test cases according to your testing needs.

setUp(): This method can be used to set the initial state of each test case before the particular test method is run.

tearDown(): This method can be used to clean up after each test case or test method is complete.

These methods are essential for effective iOS automation testing using some common testing frameworks to avoid test failure due to cache.

What goes inside those methods matters more than the methods themselves. An iOS app keeps state in several places between launches — UserDefaults, the Keychain, Core Data or SQLite stores, and cached files on disk. A test suite that does not reset them starts each test wherever the previous one finished, which produces the worst failure mode in automation: tests that pass in one order and fail in another.

• Reset state through launch arguments and environment variables rather than through the UI. XCUITest supports both natively, so the app can read a flag at startup, clear its stores and seed known test data before the first screen appears.
• Driving setup through the interface instead — logging in, tapping through onboarding — makes every test dependent on the login flow. When login breaks, the whole suite goes red and tells you nothing about what actually failed.
• Reset in setUp rather than tearDown. A test that crashes never reaches its tearDown, so a suite that cleans up afterwards leaves state behind at exactly the moment it matters most.
• Use tearDown for capturing evidence instead — a screenshot attached to the result, and terminating the app so the next launch starts cleanly.

Run the suite in CI, not on someone’s laptop

An iOS suite earns its keep when it runs on every pull request without anyone asking. Two things make that practical. The first is splitting the build from the run: compile the test bundle once with xcodebuild build-for-testing, then execute it with test-without-building. A CI job that recompiles on every device wastes most of its runtime on work it already did.

The second is where the job runs. Xcode Cloud is Apple’s own service, integrates directly with App Store Connect, and leaves you no simulator infrastructure to manage. GitHub Actions with macOS runners is more flexible and suits teams already centred on GitHub, at the cost of managing signing certificates and provisioning profiles inside the job yourself. Either way, iOS automation needs macOS somewhere in the pipeline — Xcode does not run anywhere else.

Parallel execution is what turns coverage from a scheduling problem into a configuration one. Xcode runs tests across multiple simulator instances out of the box, and a real device cloud extends the same idea to hardware: pass a list of device and OS combinations rather than one, and a matrix that would take hours sequentially finishes in minutes. The prerequisite is test isolation — suites that share global state, fixed file paths or a single backend record will race against each other and fail in ways that look like flakiness but are not.

Why iOS tests turn flaky, and what to do about it

A UI test drives your app from a separate process. It cannot see the app’s internal state, so it has no way of knowing when a screen has finished rendering or a network call has returned — it only knows what is on screen at the moment it looks. Nearly every flaky iOS test traces back to that one fact, and to a test that looked too early.

Symptom	Actual cause	Fix
Element not found, but you can see it on screen	The query ran before the view finished rendering	Wait on the element’s existence with a timeout and assert on the result. Never sleep for a fixed interval — it is either too short on a slow device or wasted time on a fast one.
Passes locally, fails in CI	Animations and slower shared runners change the timing	Launch with an argument that disables animations, and reset app state in setUp so every test starts from the same place.
A tap lands on the wrong control	No accessibility identifier, so the query matched drifting label text	Set identifiers in app code and query those (see the practice above).
One failure cascades into twenty unrelated ones	The test kept running after the first assertion failed	Set continueAfterFailure to false in setUp so the first real failure stops the test and the report stays readable.
A CI failure with nothing to debug from	No artefacts captured at the point of failure	Attach a screenshot in tearDown so every red run carries its own evidence.
Fails on one device model only	A genuine device-specific bug, not flakiness	Reproduce on that model and OS version rather than debugging against the simulator.

Appium suites carry an extra source of instability on top of these, because commands travel through the Appium server and WebDriverAgent before reaching the app. Each layer adds timing variance, and each iOS release can break the driver until it catches up. The mitigation is the same discipline — explicit waits rather than sleeps — plus pinning your Appium server and driver versions so an unattended upgrade cannot take the suite down mid-sprint.

Top iOS Automation Frameworks

• Appium:

Created by Selenium, the pioneering web application automation framework, Appium is the mobile application automation framework. Since within the same family, Appium utilizes the same Selenium WebDriver and HTTP protocol process to automate mobile applications, including iOS applications. It is an open-source platform, and it is not restricted by programming languages, as you can test the application in most of the commonly used languages, such as Java, C#, Python, Ruby, etc. Additionally, Appium can be integrated with any additional framework or tool needed to help facilitate mobile application automation. Thus, Appium offers a flexible way of setting up your testing needs as you see fit.One of the major advantages of Appium is that it works on any kind of mobile application, including web, native, and hybrid, which implies that we can use the same Appium code on both iOS and Android devices.

• XCTest/XCUITest

XCTest is Apple’s official testing framework to perform unit tests. XCUITest is a UI testing framework that is built upon the XCTest framework and includes supplementary classes that aid in UI testing such as UIAccessibility. Both frameworks can be written in either Objective C or Swift. Since it is native to iOS devices, it does not require any supporting software or packages to perform testing on the AUT (application under test).XCTest/XCUITest is faster than other automation frameworks for iOS applications. XCTest does not require additional layers of abstraction APIs and is therefore lightweight.

Apple has reorganised this area, and the three names are worth separating because they are not alternatives to each other.

Framework	What it does	Covers UI automation?
XCTest	The umbrella framework that creates and runs unit, performance and UI tests in an Xcode project	Yes, by driving XCUIAutomation
XCUIAutomation (what everyone calls XCUITest)	Holds the classes that control the app’s interface and inspect its state — XCUIApplication, XCUIElement, XCUIElementQuery, XCUIDevice, XCUIScreen	Yes, this is the UI layer
Swift Testing	Apple’s newer framework for Swift packages and Xcode projects, using macros such as @Test and @Suite, with native parameterised tests and cleaner failure output	No

In practice: if you are writing UI tests, XCUITest is still the path, driven through XCTest. If you are writing unit or integration tests in Swift, Swift Testing is now the better default — parameterised cases and readable failure messages are a real improvement over XCTest assertions, and existing XCTest suites can be migrated gradually rather than all at once. Swift Testing does not replace XCUITest and does not cover UI automation.

• EarlGrey

Google has put forward its own, open-source, and flexible, internal UI Testing framework named EarlGrey. It comes with its distinctive advantages such as:

• Synchronization Features with the UI, network requests and threads.
• User-like interaction which are app-level touch events that can perform swipes and taps.
• Visibility Checks that check if an element is visible before executing the test script.

• Detox

Detox is an end-to-end framework built for React Native apps, originally by Wix and now community-maintained. It runs as grey box rather than black box: the test process sits outside the app but holds a channel into its JavaScript layer, so it can tell when the app has gone idle and act only then. That idle-detection is the whole point of it — most timing flakiness in a React Native suite disappears when the framework stops guessing. On iOS it drives the app through XCUITest underneath. The trade-off is scope: it does not test native Swift or Objective-C apps, and real-device runs need noticeably more setup than simulator runs.

• OCMock

This framework is used to create stub objects in the iOS AUT. It can be implemented with a static library to develop iOS applications or as a framework used for OS X development. Its strengths include:

• It uses Objective-C so that most iOS application developers can develop the test cases too.
• It is also an open-source framework.
• It is easy to use by adding mock objects to unit tests.
• KIF (Keep It Functional)

Like most iOS automation testing frameworks out there, KIF is an open-source tool. It is an iOS native application, and a developer will need to add the KIF framework to the project. Some key benefits of KIF are listed below:

• The syntax is easy to understand and intuitive.
• It uses Objective C.
• Runs well on the command line of a CI pipeline.
• It can be integrated with XCode workflow effortlessly.
• It does not require any external dependencies, which many other testing frameworks do.

XCUITest or Appium: choosing between them

For most teams the framework question comes down to these two, and it is less a features comparison than a question of how many platforms you ship. Appium’s iOS driver is itself called the XCUITest driver — it drives iOS by building and installing a WebDriverAgent runner that calls Apple’s framework underneath. So the real comparison is native-direct against a cross-platform wrapper over the same engine.

	XCUITest	Appium
Platforms	Apple platforms only — iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, visionOS	iOS and Android from one suite
Languages	Swift and Objective-C	Java, Python, JavaScript, C#, Ruby and others
Architecture	Runs from Xcode with no external server	Client to Appium server to WebDriverAgent to XCUITest
Setup effort	Low — ships inside Xcode	High — driver install, Xcode command line tools, WebDriverAgent provisioning
Execution speed	Faster, no protocol translation	Slower, commands cross the WebDriver layer
Breaks when iOS updates	Rarely — first-party, tracks each release	Sometimes — WebDriverAgent has to catch up first
Cost	Free with Xcode	Free, Apache 2.0

The rule, stated plainly: if you ship iOS only and your team writes Swift, choose XCUITest — it is faster, there is nothing extra to maintain, and it stays current with each iOS release without waiting on anyone. If one suite has to cover iOS and Android, or your testers write Python or Java rather than Swift, Appium earns its extra layers. Two situations push the answer sideways. If your app is React Native, look at Detox before either. If significant parts of your UI render outside the native view hierarchy — Flutter, or heavy WKWebView content — both frameworks will struggle to see those elements at all, because both ultimately read the accessibility tree.

Conclusion

Performing iOS automation testing on iOS applications can be both interesting and challenging. As discussed above, it can be strenuous to keep up with the advancing technology, such as face-ID and fingerprint authentication, that have taken over the age-old PIN and password authentication methods. It is not easy, considering the time-restricting OS version upgrades that occur periodically, but fortunately, these upgrades are well-planned.

To summarize, it is crucial for the development and QA teams to put forth best practices to be well-equipped to handle any challenge that may arise. It is important to know when to use emulators/simulators and when the real devices need to be put to test. We need to make use of screen capturing and recording tools, as well as, crash and console logs to trace the steps of the test cases and to understand potential UI issues that may surface in order to fix them in a timely manner.

Now that we have discussed an overview of testing iOS applications, it is apparent that choosing the right automation framework, the right supplementary tools and methods, as well as testing devices (emulators/simulators/stubs) for your project team are vital in successfully testing the application. Based on the skillset of your team, choose the best framework to test your iOS application.

iOS automation testing FAQs

Do I need a Mac to run automated iOS tests?

For local development, yes. Xcode runs only on macOS, and both XCUITest and Appium’s XCUITest driver depend on Xcode and its command line tools to build and install the test runner. You can avoid buying Mac hardware by running the suite on a device cloud instead, where the macOS build environment and the devices are hosted for you — your machine only has to send the test.

Is XCUITest the same thing as XCTest?

No. XCTest is the umbrella framework that creates and runs unit, performance and UI tests. XCUITest is the UI automation layer it drives — the XCUIApplication, XCUIElement and XCUIElementQuery classes, which Apple now documents under the name XCUIAutomation. Swift Testing is a third, separate framework for unit and integration tests in Swift, and it does not do UI automation at all.

Can I automate iOS tests without writing Swift?

Yes, through Appium, which speaks the W3C WebDriver protocol and has client libraries for Java, Python, JavaScript, C# and Ruby. It drives iOS through Apple’s own framework underneath, so you get the same capabilities with more setup and a slower run. XCUITest itself is Swift or Objective-C only.

Why do my tests pass on the simulator and fail on a real device?

Usually timing. The simulator runs on your Mac’s processor and renders faster than a phone, so waits that were long enough locally expire on real hardware. The other cause is hardware: the simulator has no camera, no biometric sensor and no phone radio, so anything touching those paths behaves differently. Reproduce the failure on the specific model and OS version that reported it rather than debugging against the simulator.

How many devices and iOS versions should I test on?

Base it on your own analytics rather than a fixed number. A practical starting point is the two most recent iPhone generations, one older or smaller-screen model, one iPad if you support it, and the current plus previous major iOS version. Expand from there using the device mix in your own crash reports — the models generating real failures matter more than broad coverage.

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