August 31, 2026 2 min read

Maestro CLI 2.9.0: test light and dark mode in one flow

Manu Armani

Maestro CLI 2.9.0

Dark mode lands in Maestro flows: switch themes mid-run and check both looks in one flow, one of the most requested authoring features since 2023. config.yaml also picks up negation globs, and the rest of the release fixes issues that could block runs on WebView-heavy apps and current Chrome.

Authoring

Test light and dark mode in one flow. New commands setDarkMode, toggleDarkMode, assertDarkMode, and assertLightMode switch the appearance mid-run and check that each state renders correctly, so a single flow covers both themes. Available on iOS, Android and Web.
Keep non-flow YAML files next to your flows. config.yaml now accepts negation patterns: list a file with a leading ! and Maestro skips it. Non-Maestro YAML can live in the test folder with no restructuring.

Android WebView inspection

If your app embeds WebViews, this release makes Maestro read them reliably: React, Vue, and Angular content, very deep pages, and modern emulators included.

Flows can target React, Vue, and Angular WebView content. Maestro now reads pages built with modern SPA frameworks, so tapOn and assertVisible find elements inside those WebViews; previously the frameworks’ internal DOM references could break the capture.
Very deep pages capture reliably, and unreadable pages fail fast. Large, deeply nested DOMs come through whole, and when a page genuinely can’t be read the flow fails with an actionable test error, with no retries spent on something that can’t succeed.
One frozen WebView can’t stall the rest of your run. On Android 16 (API 36), if a single WebView stops responding, Maestro sets that WebView aside and the flow continues.

Web

Web flows run on current Chrome. On Chrome 151+, commands once again land on the page under test, and a response timeout keeps an unresponsive target from hanging the run.

Android reliability

Assert on Android form validation errors. Text matchers now read a view’s validation error, so you can check a message like “Email is required” directly.
Empty inputs read as empty in the view hierarchy. A field with no value reports empty text, with its placeholder exposed separately as hintText, so agents and tools that read the hierarchy can tell a filled input from an empty one.
setDeviceLocale passes on slower devices. Maestro waits up to 30 extra seconds for the system to apply the locale.

CLI

A network blip can’t fail your CI step after a successful upload. maestro cloud retries upload-status polls that come back with no response, on the same budget as server errors.

Full changelog: github.com/mobile-dev-inc/maestro/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md