Stopping an Android app from console

Question

The clean way of stopping the app is:

adb shell am force-stop com.my.app.package

This way you don't have to figure out the process ID.

Edit: Long after I wrote this post and it was accepted as the answer, the am force-stop command was implemented by the Android team, as mentioned in this answer.

Alternatively: Rather than just stopping the app, since you mention wanting a "clean slate" for each test run, you can use adb shell pm clear com.my.app.package, which will stop the app process and clear out all the stored data for that app.

---

If you're on Linux:
adb shell ps | grep com.myapp | awk '{print $2}' | xargs adb shell kill

That will only work for devices/emulators where you have root immediately upon running a shell. That can probably be refined slightly to call su beforehand.

Otherwise, you can do (manually, or I suppose scripted):
pc $ adb -d shell
android $ su
android # ps
android # kill <process id from ps output>

First, put the app into the background (press the device's home button)

Then....in a terminal....

adb shell am kill com.your.package

you can use the following from the device console: pm disable com.my.app.package which will kill it. Then use pm enable com.my.app.package so that you can launch it again.

If you have access to the application package, then you can install with the -r option and it will kill the process if it is currently running as a side effect. Like this:

adb -d install -r MyApp.apk ; adb -d shell am start -a android.intent.action.MAIN -n com.MyCompany.MyApp/.MyActivity

The -r option preserves the data currently associated with the app. However, if you want a clean slate like you mention you might not want to use that option.

If you target a non-rooted device and/or have services in you APK that you don't want to stop as well, the other solutions won't work.

To solve this problem, I've resorted to a broadcast message receiver I've added to my activity in order to stop it.

public class TestActivity extends Activity {
    private static final String STOP_COMMAND = "com.example.TestActivity.STOP";

    private BroadcastReceiver broadcastReceiver = new BroadcastReceiver() {
        @Override
        public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
            TestActivity.this.finish();
        }
    };

    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

        //other stuff...

        registerReceiver(broadcastReceiver, new IntentFilter(STOP_COMMAND));
    }
}

That way, you can issue this adb command to stop your activity:

adb shell am broadcast -a com.example.TestActivity.STOP