How to use monkey and monkeyrunner tools for android testing?

Question

How do you use monkey and monkeyrunner tools for android testing?

What are the basic commands needed?

Answer 1

Here are some useful tips when using monkey test.

Specify one activity

Add category in manifest:

<activity android:name="MonkeyActivity">
    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.MONKEY" />
    </intent-filter>
</activity>

and use command like this:

adb shell monkey -p my.package -c android.intent.category.MONKEY -v 500

Prevent notification disturb

In Android 5.0+ you can use the feature Screen Pinning.

• open this feature in "settings" > "security" > "screen pinning"
• click recent/multitasking button beside home button
• click the green pin icon to pin the Application you want to test

then run your monkey test.

stop monkeyTest

Use the following command to stop monkey test:

adb shell ps | awk '/com\.android\.commands\.monkey/ { system("adb shell kill " $2) }'

reference

• Android monkey test choose a specific activity
• How do I stop the monkey madness?

Answer 2

monkey and monkeyrunner are different tools.

Monkey

You can run monkey from adb shell, then it will generate pseudo-random streams of user events. You can specify some conditions and constraints for the execution of these events (see documentation)

The basic syntax is:

$ adb shell monkey [options] <event-count>

Monkeyrunner

monkeyrunner is an API to control an Android device or emulator from outside of Android code, as the documentation defines. You can basically write Python scripts that describes some actions to be executed on target device.

Sample Program

Quoting Android Developers documentation:

The monkeyrunner tool is not related to the UI/Application Exerciser Monkey, also known as the monkey tool. The monkey tool runs in an adb shell directly on the device or emulator and generates pseudo-random streams of user and system events. In comparison, the monkeyrunner tool controls devices and emulators from a workstation by sending specific commands and events from an API.