Why your mobile XPath breaks: a practical ranking of locator strategies for Android, iOS and Flutter

A lot of what gets filed as "flaky mobile test" is a locator that was never stable in the first place. The test passed for three weeks, a developer wrapped a view in a FrameLayout , and an absolute XPath that encoded the entire hierarchy fell over. Nobody touched the test. It still broke. This is the order I pick locators in, why, and what each one looks like when it fails. Android and iOS first…