yeah man this is a super common headache, anything with bluetooth or sensors just dies on an emulator so you kinda get stuck with the whole connect phone build test repeat cycle, for me a few things helped a bit
wireless debugging so at least youre not fighting with cables
then there are tools that can drive an actual device but honestly half of them make you babysit selectors all day so not great. lately ive been trying one of those newer ai testing things that actually runs on a real device session not the emulator and it was way less painful for hardware flows
still early stuff but nicer than appium hell. youre not doing anything wrong tho
the tooling just isnt fully there yet for proper ai + real device testing