Why am I required to do manually when before I didn't need to?

[AlbertoMeQ]

Hello!

2 months or so ago I had managed to setup appium + UIAutomator2. I just needed to install the driver (via NPM) and everything magically worked.

Today, I spent a few hours trying to understand why I kept getting the following error:

[debug] [Instrumentation] INSTRUMENTATION_STATUS: Error=Unable to find instrumentation info for: ComponentInfo{io.appium.uiautomator2.server.test/androidx.test.runner.AndroidJUnitRunner}
[debug] [Instrumentation] INSTRUMENTATION_STATUS: id=ActivityManagerService
[debug] [Instrumentation] INSTRUMENTATION_STATUS_CODE: -1
[debug] [Instrumentation] android.util.AndroidException: INSTRUMENTATION_FAILED: io.appium.uiautomator2.server.test/androidx.test.runner.AndroidJUnitRunner
[debug] [Instrumentation] 	at com.android.commands.am.Instrument.run(Instrument.java:524)
[debug] [Instrumentation] 	at com.android.commands.am.Am.runInstrument(Am.java:199)
[debug] [Instrumentation] 	at com.android.commands.am.Am.onRun(Am.java:80)
[debug] [Instrumentation] 	at com.android.internal.os.BaseCommand.run(BaseCommand.java:62)
[debug] [Instrumentation] 	at com.android.commands.am.Am.main(Am.java:50)
[debug] [Instrumentation] 	at com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit.nativeFinishInit(Native Method)
[debug] [Instrumentation] 	at com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit.main(RuntimeInit.java:355)
[debug] [Instrumentation] The process has exited with code 1

I managed to fix it by downloading this repository and following its steps (gradle clean assemble + manually install the 2 apks).

My question is: why is this now required for the automation to work when before all was nice and easy?

Also, I was planning to use appium and Browserstack but if I wouldn't be able to install the 2 apks manually every time. So, I must find a better solution.

Is this a bug somewhere else or is the new "workflow"?