A few folks have asked me what’s involved with my simple automation
script that ultimately produces screenshots of running browsers on
Android. It’s rather uncomplicated, I am using the monkeyrunner tool
that is bundled with the Android SDK. As the Android Developers
guide indicates:
The monkeyrunner tool provides an API for writing programs that
control an Android device or emulator from outside of Android code.
With monkeyrunner, you can write a Python program that installs an
Android application or test package, runs it, sends keystrokes to it,
takes screenshots of its user interface, and stores screenshots on the
workstation. The monkeyrunner tool is primarily designed to test
applications and devices at the functional/framework level and for
running unit test suites, but you are free to use it for other
purposes.
Intended mainly as a tool for synthesizing input on Android, one can
also easily get a capture of the Android screen with its Python/Jython
API. The code below listens and connects to an Android device, loops
through a list of provided Android browser package/activities, visits a
site (provided by a CSV), waits a couple seconds for page-load (Hack!
How can I go about better doing this?), snaps a picture and writes it
out to a directory provided by argument.
from com.android.monkeyrunner import MonkeyRunner, MonkeyDevice
import sys, csv
browsers = ['com.android.chrome/.Main',
'org.mozilla.fennec/.App']
# Connects to the current device, returning a MonkeyDevice object
device = MonkeyRunner.waitForConnection()
#Start each browser activity with the provided URL
for run, browser in enumerate(browsers):
# Visit each site
for visit, site in enumerate(csv.reader(open(sys.argv[1]).readlines())):
# Start the activity with the provided site
device.startActivity(component=browser, uri=site[0])
# Wait for page load timeout MonkeyRunner.sleep(20)
# Snap a screenshot of the running activity
device.takeSnapshot().writeToFile("%s%s-%s.png" % (sys.argv[2], visit, run), 'png')