BrowserStack Appium sessionTimeout: Determining per‑session vs global scope

Answer

The sessionTimeout capability in BrowserStack Appium is a per‑session setting. Setting it to 300 seconds will terminate only that individual Appium session after the specified period (idle or total, depending on the underlying timeout mode) and will not affect any other sessions running in parallel.

Confirmed facts

• BrowserStack documentation defines sessionTimeout as a capability that sets the maximum allowed duration (or idle time) for an individual Appium session.
• There is no separate global sessionTimeout capability; each session receives its own independent timer based on the capabilities supplied when the session is created.

Likely explanation

When you include sessionTimeout in the desired capabilities passed to the Appium driver, BrowserStack starts a timer for that session alone. If you launch two parallel sessions with different values (e.g., 120 s and 300 s), each session will end according to its own timer, confirming the per‑session scope. To enforce a uniform limit across all sessions you must apply the same sessionTimeout value to each session’s capabilities or manage termination externally via your test framework or BrowserStack’s REST API.

Steps to verify (only if you need to confirm the behavior)

1. Add the capability to your session initialization code, e.g.:

   capabilities.setCapability("sessionTimeout", 300);

2. Start a single session and monitor its duration in the BrowserStack dashboard or via the API; it should end after approximately the specified time of inactivity.
3. Run two parallel sessions with different sessionTimeout values (e.g., 120 and 300 seconds) and observe that each session ends independently according to its own setting.