Introducing ADB-enhanced: A swiss army knife for Android development
Ashish Bhatia
Posted on February 3, 2019
Android development requires tons of disconnected approaches for the development and testing. Consider some scenarios
- To test runtime permission – Go to Settings -> Applications -> Application info of the app you are looking for and disable that permission.
- To test a fresh install –
adb shell pm clear-data com.example
- To test your app under the battery saver mode – turn on the battery saver mode by expanding the notification bar
- To stop the execution of an app – kill it via activity manager,
adb shell am kill com.example
- To test your app under doze mode – first, make the device believe that it is unplugged via
adb shell dumpsys battery unplug
, then, make it think that it is discharging viaadb shell dumpsys battery set status 3
, and then enable doze mode viaadb shell dumpsys deviceidle force-idle
. And don’t forget to execute a set of unrelated complementary commands once you are done to bring the device back to the normal state. - To see the overdraw of an app – Go to the developer options and enable/disable it there.
Over time, this became a significant mental burden that I first wrote some of these flows in a text file and then converted them to automated shell scripts. But when even that felt insufficient, I created a tool for myself called adb-enhanced.
How it works:
First, install the tool. I wrote this in Python, so, if the following command does not work, install Python
pip3 install adb-enhanced # I would discourage Python 2 based install at this point
Now, let’s look at the about use-cases again with this tool:
- To test a runtime permission :
# Use grant instead of revoke to grant the permission
adbe permission revoke com.example camera # See all possible such permissions via "adbe -h"
# Use grant instead of revoke to grant the permission
adbe permission revoke com.example camera # See all possible such permissions via "adbe -h"
- To test a fresh install –
# Unlike adb shell pm clear-data com.example, this command will
# produce an error if com.example is not installed
# which is good for catching typos
adbe clear-data com.example
# Unlike adb shell pm clear-data com.example, this command will
# produce an error if com.example is not installed
# which is good for catching typos
adbe clear-data com.example
- To test your app under the battery saver mode –
# As you would guess, use "off" to turn the battery saver off
adbe battery saver on
# As you would guess, use "off" to turn the battery saver off
adbe battery saver on
- To stop the execution of an app –
# For a more aggressive kill, try adbe force-stop com.example
adbe stop com.example
- To test your app under doze mode
adbe doze on # Use "off" to turn the doze mode off
- To see the overdraw of the app
adbe overdraw on
I open-sourced the code at https://github.com/ashishb/adb-enhanced. See the GitHub repository for what all this tool can do. Feedbacks and pull requests are welcome.
Posted on February 3, 2019
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