Verify Android UI with automated ADB testing

This skill runs a systematic workflow for testing React Native and native Android applications on an Android emulator using ADB commands - allowing autonomous interaction, state verification, and visual regression checking without manual tapping.

Use it for verifying UI changes in React Native or native Android apps, autonomous debugging of layout issues or interaction bugs, ensuring feature functionality when manual testing is too slow, or capturing automated screenshots for PR documentation. Prerequisites are an Android emulator running, adb installed and on PATH, and the application in debug mode for logcat access.

The workflow runs in four steps. Device calibration checks screen resolution before interacting (adb shell wm size), since layouts are often scaled, so the physical size returned should be the base for coordinate calculations. UI inspection dumps the UI hierarchy with uiautomator, pulls it locally, and searches the resulting XML for text, content-desc, or resource-id, using the bounds attribute ([x1,y1][x2,y2]) to define the clickable area. Interaction commands are tap (adb shell input tap <x> <y>, at the center of an element's bounds), swipe (adb shell input swipe <x1> <y1> <x2> <y2> <duration_ms>, for scrolling), text input (adb shell input text "<message>", with limited support for special characters), and key events (adb shell input keyevent <code_id>, e.g. 66 for Enter). Verification and reporting captures a screenshot after interaction to confirm UI changes, and monitors JS console logs in real time - filtering logcat for "ReactNativeJS" - to catch errors or confirm success; generated files (screenshots, dumped XML) are stored in an artifacts/ folder to satisfy project organization rules.

adb shell uiautomator dump /sdcard/view.xml && adb pull /sdcard/view.xml ./artifacts/view.xml

The workflow is built entirely on the Android Debug Bridge (adb) and its shell, input, uiautomator, screencap, logcat, and pull subcommands - no additional tooling beyond a running emulator and a debug build of the app.

Developers and QA engineers testing React Native or native Android UI changes who want a repeatable, scriptable verification loop instead of manual tapping. Named best practices include waiting briefly for animations before verifying, calculating the arithmetic center of an element's bounds for reliable taps, using distinct log markers to make grep-based verification easy, and stopping to troubleshoot rather than blind-tapping when a UI dump doesn't find the expected element.