Shopify's mobile end-to-end suite had decayed to ~50% stability — blocking more good PRs than it caught real bugs. Jordan and Riley cover how the team rebuilt it: an opinionated wrapper around Appium with a builder-style API that forces an assertion at every step (doubling as a condition-based wait, killing hardcoded sleeps), plus computer-vision element finding (PaddleOCR for text, OpenCV matching icons against Polaris design-system SVGs) so tests locate elements the way a user would. Test IDs became opt-in fallbacks with an "UNSAFE_" prefix. Result: 98% stability. Takeaway: frameworks that expose low-level controls without guardrails accumulate anti-patterns — make best practices the path of least resistance. Source: How we raised mobile end-to-end test stability to 98% — Shopify Engineering, Aug 12 2026 —  ...