Example - Android App and Mobile Web Automation

Get introduced to capabilities for testing android apps and mobile web on android phones.

We'll cover the following

- What are capabilities?
  - Capabilities for Android app automation
    - Finding app package & app activity
      - Using aapt command
      - Manually by launching the app
- Writing Android app test
  - Minimum required capabilities
  - Android test code
- - Running the code
- Writing Android mobile web test
  - Minimum required capabilities
  - Android mobile web test code
- - Running the code

What are capabilities?

Capabilities or DesiredCapabilities are simple key-value pairs encoded as JSON objects. These capabilities are sent by the client to the server, which could be a ChromeDriver service, GeckoDriver service, EdgeDriver service, or AppiumDriver service, to tell the server how the test should work and what features or capabilities to enable.

Every driver will have their own set of capabilities.

The following is a sample DesiredCapabilities JSON that the client requests from the Appium service for creating an AndroidDriver to test mobile web browsers.

{
  "browserName": "Chrome",
  "platformName": "Android",
  "deviceName": "Emulator",
  "udid": "emulator-5554",
  "automationName": "UIAutomator2"
}

We can search for the capabilities at https://caps.cloudgrey.io.

Capabilities for Android app automation

The following table shows the capabilities with respect to automating Android applications:

Capability Name	Description	Possible Values
`automationName`	automation engine to use	UiAutomator2
`platformName`	mobile OS platform to use	Android
`platformVersion`	mobile OS version	7.1, 4.4, etc.
`deviceName`	kind of mobile device or emulator to use	Android Emulator, Galaxy S4, etc…
`app`	absolute path of an .apk file or a .zip file that contains the .apk file or publicly hosted .zip file	/path/.apk or /path/.zip or http://…/app.apk
`otherApps`	app or list of apps (as a JSON array) to install at the start of running tests. It could be a local file or publicly hosted app	[ “/path/.apk”, “http://…/app.apk” ]
`autoLaunch`	initializes the app to test automatically. Defaults to true	true or false
`appActivity`	name of the activity to launch at the start of the session when `autoLaunch` is set to `true`. By default, it is inferred from the `app` if passed
`appPackage`	Java package of the app under test. By default, it is inferred from the `app` if passed
`udid`	unique device identifier of the connected physical device	e.g. emulator-5554, 4sfdawg456
`autoWebview`	move directly into `WebView` context. Default to false	true or false
`noReset`	do not reset app state before this session	true or false
`fullReset`	performs a complete reset	true or false
`chromedriverExecutable`	absolute local path to webdriver executable	/abs/path/to/webdriver
`unicodeKeyboard`	enable Unicode input. Defaults to false	true or false
`resetKeyboard`	resets keyboard to its original state after running Unicode tests with `unicodeKeyboard` capability. Default to `false`	true or false
`nativeWebScreenshot`	in a web context, use native (adb) method for taking a screenshot than proxying to `ChromeDriver`. Defaults – false	true or false
`autoGrantPermissions`	automatically determines which permissions your app requires and grants them to the app on install. Defaults to false	true or false
`networkSpeed`	sets the network speed emulation. Defaults to full	“full”, “gsm”, “edge”, “hscsd”, “gprs”, “umts”, “hsdpa”, “lte”, “evdo”

There are more capabilities other than what is mentioned above. Follow these links – general-capabilities, android-only, uiautomator-capabilities - to learn more.

app is needed when fullReset is set to true. appPackage and appActivity are not needed if app is set. Either app or appActivity and appPackage are mandatory.

Finding app package & app activity

appPackage and appActivity are needed if we do not have the .apk file and launch and test an already existing app installed on the device. But they aren’t necessary if we have the .apk file as Appium will infer them.

We can find appPackage and appActivity in two ways:

Using aapt command
Manually by launching the app

Using `aapt` command

To use the aapt command, we need the .apk file.

If we want to fetch the .apk file of an already installed application on the device, run the following command and search for the app name that we want to test.

$ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools/adb shell pm list packages -f

Note: Replace $ANDROID_HOME with %ANDROID_HOME% if you are using a Windows machine.

For demonstration, let us find the appPackage and appActivity for the app Youtube.

The line that watches with the text “Youtube”, in the response of the above command, should look something like this:

package:/system/product/app/YouTube/YouTube.apk=com.google.android.youtube

For copying the installed app to our local machine using adb pull, run the following command:

$ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools/adb pull /system/product/app/YouTube/YouTube.apk youtube.apk

Now once we have the .apkfile, we can find the appPackage and appActivity using aapt.

aapt will be present at $ANDROID_HOME/build-tools/30.0.3/aapt, where 30.0.3 might change as per your local installation.

Run the following command and search for the texts launchable-activity and package to find the values of aapActivity and appPackage respectively.

aapt dump badging youtube.apk

Manually by launching the app

Incase launchable-activity is not showing up in the response of the above command, we can manually launch and monitor the app using the command adb log to see the activity that is launched when the application is starting.

We can look for the line that contains ActivityTaskManager and the package name we found using aapt command. It should look something like below:

I ActivityTaskManager: Displayed com.google.android.youtube/com.google.android.apps.youtube.app.WatchWhileActivity

From the above text, we find com.google.android.apps.youtube.app.WatchWhileActivity is the appActivity.

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