[ Bug]: Appium protocol commands are not available in non-mobile Appium sessions

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WebdriverIO Version

9.31.7 (plain webdriver, not webdriverio)

Node.js Version

24.20.0

Mode

WDIO Testrunner

Which capabilities are you using?

{
  "platformName": "mac",
  "appium:automationName": "safari"
}

What happened?

When creating an Appium-based non-mobile session (for example, using one of Appium's browser drivers like chromium/gecko/safari), no Appium protocol commands are available, even though many commands in this protocol are still supported in a session like this (for example, retrieval of settings/capabilities/commands/extension methods/etc.).

Direct curl calls to Appium endpoints work as expected - the respective commands are simply not available on the WDIO level.

What is your expected behavior?

I expect all Appium protocol methods to be accessible in any Appium session, regardless of whether it is mobile or not.

With the context of previous discussions (https://github.com/webdriverio/webdriverio/issues/13947, https://github.com/webdriverio/webdriverio/issues/14140), while it is true that not all Appium protocol methods are supported by all drivers, I would not expect WDIO to know which driver supports which commands, especially considering the existence of multiple third-party Appium drivers. Therefore I think it's better for WDIO to allow all protocol commands, and if the driver does not support a command, simply return the error coming from the driver.

The current implementation appears to only include the Appium protocol commands if the session is determined to be a mobile session (driver.isMobile), in webdriver/src/utils.ts. In turn, isMobile returns false for browser-based Appium sessions, in wdio-utils/src/envDetector.ts.

To remedy this, I would probably recommend adding a new isAppium top-level property, which would return true if the appium:automationName capability is present and populated, regardless of its value. Then update the protocol inclusion check to use isAppium instead of isMobile.

How to reproduce the bug.

1. Install Appium and the safari driver
2. Start a WDIO session using the above capabilities
3. Observe that Appium protocol methods such as getAppiumCommands are not available

Relevant log output

N/A

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Is there an existing issue for this?

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