How to use ADB to send touch events to device using sendevent command?

Question

I am trying to send touch events to a device using AndroidDebugBridge, so that I can do some basic automation for UI tests. I have followed the discussion in LINK. I am able to use sendevent to simulate touch on emulators, but unable to do the same on a device.

Like in above link the emulator seems to send out 6 events for each touch ( xcoord, ycoord, 2 for press,2 for release) and it was easy to use this information to sendevents, but a getevent for the touchscreen for a device seems to generate far too many events.

Has somebody managed to send touch from ADB to a device? Could you please share the solution.

Answer 1

Android comes with an input command-line tool that can simulate miscellaneous input events. To simulate tapping, it's:

input tap x y

You can use the adb shell ( > 2.3.5) to run the command remotely:

adb shell input tap x y

Answer 2

In order to do a particular action (for example to open the web browser), you need to first figure out where to tap. To do that, you can first run:

adb shell getevent -l

Once you press on the device, at the location that you want, you will see this output:

<...>
/dev/input/event3: EV_KEY       BTN_TOUCH            DOWN
/dev/input/event3: EV_ABS       ABS_MT_POSITION_X    000002f5
/dev/input/event3: EV_ABS       ABS_MT_POSITION_Y    0000069e

adb is telling you that a key was pressed (button down) at position 2f5, 69e in hex which is 757 and 1694 in decimal.

If you now want to generate the same event, you can use the input tap command at the same position:

adb shell input tap 757 1694

More info can be found at:

https://source.android.com/devices/input/touch-devices.html http://source.android.com/devices/input/getevent.html

Answer 3

2.3.5 did not have input tap, just input keyevent and input text You can use the monkeyrunner for it: (this is a copy of the answer at https://stackoverflow.com/a/18959385/1587329):

You might want to use monkeyrunner like this:

$ monkeyrunner
>>> from com.android.monkeyrunner import MonkeyRunner, MonkeyDevice
>>> device = MonkeyRunner.waitForConnection()
>>> device.touch(200, 400, MonkeyDevice.DOWN_AND_UP)

You can also do a drag, start activies etc. Have a look at the api for MonkeyDevice.

Answer 4

You don't need to use

adb shell getevent -l

command, you just need to enable in Developer Options on the device [Show Touch data] to get X and Y.

Some more information can be found in my article here: https://mobileqablog.wordpress.com/2016/08/20/android-automatic-touchscreen-taps-adb-shell-input-touchscreen-tap/

Answer 5

Consider using Android's uiautomator, with adb shell uiautomator [...] or directly using the .jar that comes with the SDK.