Android in Practice

Appendix D. monkeyrunner

In this last appendix, we’re going to look at another recent addition to the Android SDK toolset: the monkeyrunner. The material covered here complements what we covered in chapters 13 and 14—testing, instrumentation, and build automation—although the monkeyrunner takes a special role both technically and usage-wise, as you’ll see in a minute.

D.1. Overview

Not to be confused with the monkey tool (see chapter 13), the monkeyrunner is a scripted and extensible application that allows you to control an emulator or device in a programmatic fashion. Similar to Android’s instrumentation framework, it allows you to steer flow of an application by launching activities and sending input events, but it does so from outside ...