How to run a specific Android app using Terminal? [duplicate]
Use the cmd activity start-activity
(or the alternative am start
) command, which is a command-line interface to the ActivityManager. Use am
to start activities as shown in this help:
$ adb shell am
usage: am [start|instrument]
am start [-a <ACTION>] [-d <DATA_URI>] [-t <MIME_TYPE>]
[-c <CATEGORY> [-c <CATEGORY>] ...]
[-e <EXTRA_KEY> <EXTRA_VALUE> [-e <EXTRA_KEY> <EXTRA_VALUE> ...]
[-n <COMPONENT>] [-D] [<URI>]
...
For example, to start the Contacts application, and supposing you know only the package name but not the Activity
, you can use
$ pkg=com.google.android.contacts
$ comp=$(adb shell cmd package resolve-activity --brief -c android.intent.category.LAUNCHER $pkg | tail -1)
$ adb shell cmd activity start-activity $comp
or the alternative
$ adb shell am start -n $comp
See also http://www.kandroid.org/online-pdk/guide/instrumentation_testing.html (may be a copy of obsolete url : http://source.android.com/porting/instrumentation_testing.html ) for other details.
To terminate the application you can use
$ adb shell am kill com.google.android.contacts
or the more drastic
$ adb shell am force-stop com.google.android.contacts
I keep this build-and-run script handy, whenever I am working from command line:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
PACKAGE=com.example.demo
ACTIVITY=.MainActivity
APK_LOCATION=app/build/outputs/apk/app-debug.apk
echo "Package: $PACKAGE"
echo "Building the project with tasks: $TASKS"
./gradlew $TASKS
echo "Uninstalling $PACKAGE"
adb uninstall $PACKAGE
echo "Installing $APK_LOCATION"
adb install $APK_LOCATION
echo "Starting $ACTIVITY"
adb shell am start -n $PACKAGE/$ACTIVITY
You can Start the android Service by this command.
adb shell am startservice -n packageName/.ServiceClass
I used all the above answers and it was giving me errors so I tried
adb shell monkey -p com.yourpackage.name -c android.intent.category.LAUNCHER 1
and it worked. One advantage is you dont have to specify your launcher activity if you use this command.