Hey there,
A common problem when starting with android automation with appium after you have learned basics is to find the package name and activity name to get started with Appium driver session
This is easy if you have access to the source code and friendly developers around but what if you want to know this information for any app from the Google play store?
Turns out its possible to get this info entirely using adb
.
Letβs see how.
Ensure adb is set up and on path
- Ensure android SDK is installed and already in your path. It automatically gets installed if you download Android studio
- Add below entry in your
.zshrc
or.bashrc
file followed bysource <file_name>
if you are on the mac otherwise add these in your windows system environment variables to allow all the common CLI to be available without having to type the fully qualified path every time
# Android specific env vars
export ANDROID\_HOME=$HOME/Library/Android/sdk
export PATH=$ANDROID\_HOME/tools:$PATH
export PATH=$ANDROID\_HOME/platform-tools:$PATH
export PATH=$ANDROID\_HOME/tools/bin:$PATH
Get app package name
- Open the app on a real device connected via USB (with USB debugging on) or on an android emulator
- Execute below:
adb shell dumpsys window windows | grep -i "mCurrentFocus"
For example, Here is the output if you run above command with twitter app already open
mCurrentFocus=Window{6c0629c u0 com.twitter.android/com.twitter.android.onboarding.common.CtaSubtaskActivity}
You should see packageName/currentActivity
in the output.
As you can rightly guess our package name is:
com.twitter.android
Get start activity for use
While the above command gets you to name of the current activity, It might not be the activity that the app starts with and thus cause your appium test case to fail in driver initialization itself
How can we work around this?
We can use adb
and aapt
tools to figure this out. Letβs see how to do this.
Get a list of installed packages and path to base apk
We can execute the below command to get a list of all installed packages in the device and filter to get only the app for which we want to find out this info
adb shell pm list packages -f | grep -i "<app\_name>"
Here is a sample output for twitter app
package:/data/app/com.twitter.android-eka4BzKX4Con18lwXr0yAQ==/base.apk=com.twitter.android
Get the base.apk file for the app
Next, we need to get the base apk file into our local machine. We can easily do this via adb pull
Also, notice, I have passed the output of the above command after removing the app package name
adb pull /data/app/com.twitter.android-eka4BzKX4Con18lwXr0yAQ==/base.apk
You should see a file getting downloaded on your current path. For example:
/data/app/com.twitter.android-eka4BzKX.... 80.2 MB/s (19076098 bytes in 0.227s)
Get the activity name using aapt
tool
Android SDK comes with AAPT tools (Android asset packaging tool) which allows us to compile and build into binary format. We can use this for our specific purpose of finding out the start activity
If aapt
is already on your path then you can remove directly use it else choose the version which you want to use (usually the latest) under build-tools
and run below command with your base.apk
files name
~/Library/Android/sdk/build-tools/28.0.3/aapt dump badging base.apk | grep -i "launchable-activity"
You should output like below. This lets you know the activity which can be used to launch the app with which in this case is: com.twitter.android.StartActivity
launchable-activity: name='com.twitter.android.StartActivity' label='' icon=''
Conclusion
ADB is a really powerful tool for android automation and with the use of adb
and aapt
we can very easily find out the package name and activity name to use to start with our appium automation.
If you found this tip useful, do share it with your friends or colleagues and until next time. Cheers! Happy testing.
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