How do you disable animations at the system level for an android device/emulator using adb with API 23?

Question

Based on reading, the values window_animation_scale, transition_animation_scale and animator_duration_scale need to be set to 0

The following works for API 22 but not for API 23:

adb shell settings put global window_animation_scale 0.0 

Even the below command did not work for API 23

adb shell content update --uri content://settings/system --bind value:s:0.0 --where 'name="window_animation_scale"' 

We want to disable animations to prevent flaky visual test failures only. We do not want to introduce this logic in the application and hence want to apply it at the system level rather than through the application.

Answer 1

You can execute the following adb commands to disable the animations:

adb shell settings put global window_animation_scale 0 adb shell settings put global transition_animation_scale 0 adb shell settings put global animator_duration_scale 0 

Also, you could take a look at this repo

Build the project and download the generated .apk file and follow the instructions mentioned in that project to disable the animations and you should have a smooth sailing afterwards. You could also download the same .apk file from a lot of other sources (go google!).

Once you have the .apk file then issue the following commands:

 adb install -r android_emulator_hacks.apk  adb shell pm grant no.finn.android_emulator_hacks android.permission.SET_ANIMATION_SCALE  adb shell am start -n no.finn.android_emulator_hacks/no.finn.android_emulator_hacks.HackActivity 

Answer 2

The answer by Mark W should be accepted You can also save it as a shell script for convenience, i.e.:

#!/bin/sh adb shell settings put global window_animation_scale 0.0 adb shell settings put global transition_animation_scale 0.0 adb shell settings put global animator_duration_scale 0.0 

then in terminal just call

sh path/to/file.sh 

Or go one step further and save an alias shortcut in your bash profile :)