Android: Unit testing Android applications with Robolectric and Mockito

Question

I have a Java library that uses a few things from the Android APIs. I'd like to use Mockito to write unit tests for this library.

Is there a way I can go about this?

Mockito doesn't play nice on the Dalvik VM, see this post: Using Mockito with Android virtual machine

UPDATE:

Since this post I've discovered Robolectric, and I've had the opportunity to work out of Pivotal Labs and make some small contributions to this library. I would recommend using this over the Android testing framework/mockito. Also, you're free to use Robolectric AND Mockito, but the shadow objects in Robolectric make Mockito unnecessary for most use cases.

The problem with trying to unit test Android is that the Android library that you build on has every method stubbed out to either throw a stub exception, or return null. If you want to test your app and want any Android behavior you are out of luck, unless you use Robolectric which rewrites the byte-code on the fly when the classes load, and injects a shadow object that simulates the behavior.

UPDATE 2:

It's been a while and things have changed. Many of the Shadow classes in Robolectric have been replaced with the real Android classes. The real Android jars are now used and Robolectric only loads Shadow classes for a much smaller set of things. This is even more of a reason to use Robolectric for your Android testing.

Answer 1

After much Googling, I have come across an answer for this here.

Basically it involves using the Robolectric unit testing framework, which intercepts the loading of the Android classes. You can then go ahead and use Mockito (although it isn't necessary in most cases) and run your tests on the JVM!