Unable to open UIAutomatorviewer on Mac High Sierra

Question

We have brand new MacBooks with High Sierra (10.13.6). Other system info:

JAVA Version: java version "11.0.1" 2018-10-16 LTS

Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment 18.9 (build 11.0.1+13-LTS)

JAVA_HOME: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-11.0.1.jdk/Contents/Home

When tried to open Android UIAutomatorViwer we're getting following error:

/Library/Android/sdk/tools/bin/uiautomatorviewer ; exit;

/Library/Android/sdk/tools/lib is not supported. Use -classpath instead. Error: Could not create the Java Virtual Machine. Error: A fatal exception has occurred. Program will exit. logout Saving session... ...copying shared history... ...saving history...truncating history files... ...completed. Deleting expired sessions...111 completed.

More details: Java is at: /usr/bin/java

Answer 1

• Installed older java(8) JDK
• Updated Java version to 1.8 in JAVA_HOME

Commands used to update Java Version:

cd ~/
vim ~/.bash_profile
Updated the JAVA_HOME
Save in vim using :wq!
source ~/.bash_profile

• Restart & UiAutomatorViewer is working!

Answer 2

You need Java 8 for uiautomator as mentioned in this as well as other threads. But you can do this without updating the JAVA_HOME variable.

Update the java_exe path in the uiautomator.bat file using any editor.

For Windows systems, find the line

set java_exe=call ..\lib\find_java.bat

Update that to:

set java_exe=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_271\bin\java.exe

In this way, you don't need to update the JAVA_HOME variable which has a higher jdk version(useful for other programs).