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Appium is a tool that provides access to automation capabilities for various platforms. It acts as an HTTP server that can be accessed from any programming language using a client library. The Appium team writes drivers for different platforms, which implement the WebDriver protocol, and these drivers can be installed and used by anyone. The goal of Appium is to provide a universal interface for UI automation of everything, and it achieves this by empowering the community to develop functionality on top of Appium as a platform.Anyone can create a driver for a particular platform by creating a Node.js module that conforms to the WebDriver protocol and implements any (sub|super)set of the protocol. Sharing drivers with others is easy using the Appium driver CLI, and they can be open or closed source. The vision of Appium is huge, and it cannot hope to have the platform-specific expertise or maintain drivers for many different platforms. Therefore, it provides tools to empower the community to join in its vision.In addition to drivers, Appium has released a plugin system that enables anyone to build and share modules that change how Appium works. Plugins can be published and consumed via a parallel Plugin CLI, and they can do various things such as adding the ability for Appium to find and interact with screen regions based on a template image. There are very few limitations on what you can do with plugins, so you might also be interested in learning how to Build Plugins in Node.js that can be used with Appium.Overall, Appium is an extensible, universal interface for the UI automation of potentially everything, and it achieves this by empowering the community to develop functionality on top of Appium as a platform.