BrowserStack Appium sessionTimeout: Determining per‑session vs global scope

BrowserStack Appium sessionTimeout scope clarification

The goal is to establish whether the sessionTimeout desired capability controls the lifetime of each individual Appium session or functions as a global timeout that terminates all active sessions after the specified period.

BrowserStack’s documentation mentions the parameter but does not state its scope, and the default value may differ across API versions, creating uncertainty when designing long‑running test suites that rely on parallel execution.

What is the exact behavior of sessionTimeout for a single session? Does setting sessionTimeout to 300 seconds terminate only that session after five minutes, or does it affect the entire pool of concurrent sessions? If the timeout is global, how can a per‑session limit be achieved?