I haven't had to do much mobile app testing recently, but last week I got dragged back in to it for an afternoon. I was very quickly reminded how much I hate testing mobile apps.

The task I needed to accomplish was fairly straightforward: log in with a dozen or so test accounts and verify that the accounts had been created correctly. This was going to be a one off activity so trying to automate it would have little ROI.

But just having to type a dozen usernames and passwords on a phone keyboard is enough to try my patience, so I fall back to using Android Debug Bridge.

The problem is that I don't use adb often enough to remember how to use it. So I decided to write a simplified wrapper for it to make it simple to use the small subset of commands that I actually need, specifically sending text and taking screenshots.

If situations change and I get sucked back in to the mobile testing world, I may spend some more time making this more usefull.

TL;DR

• git clone git@github.com:marcallenbetts/android-test-util.git
• npm install
• node atu.js
• help