Crawling Apps UIs (and Learning Everything)
Capsule is a program designed to crawl all of the UIs of an Android app and store the view hierarchies, screenshots, and relationships between views. It attempts to click on all clickable components and reach as many unique views as possible.
Capsule requires an Android emulator or phone using a debug version of Android and uses the AndroidViewClient library and Android Debug Bridge commands to communicate with the device.
The application considers views to be distinct if they have a different activity name, fragment composition, or view hierarchy. It stores all of the data in a /capsule/data/ directory.
If Capsule is run with no command line arguments with the command, it crawls the current app (assuming that the current view is the starting view of the app.)
Although the device name is optional with no command line arguments, you must specify the device name if you pass in any arguments.
$ python capsule.py emulator-5554
If a text file is passed in as a command line argument (with -f or --file), Capsule attempts to crawl each app listed in the file (one app per line), assuming that all of the packages are already installed on the device.
$ python capsule.py emulator-5554 -f /[PATH TO FILE]/list.txt
If a directory is passed in as an argument (with -d or --dir), Capsule installs, crawls, and uninstalls each of the apps in the directory in alphabetical order.
$ python capsule.py -d /[PATH TO APKS]/
-r or --recrawl: Recrawl an already crawled app. If this is not specified and a directory already exists at /data/[APP NAME], it will skip crawling the app.
Capsule serves many purposes, included automated testing and acquiring large samples of Android UIs with very little effort. Developers can use it to test the behavior of all of their clickable components and can find bugs, crashes, and possible user traces without having to rely on a testing framework or change the tests as the app’s UIs change. Although exhaustively searching each app will not replicate typical user behavior, it can help gain a large corpus of data and find bugs or unintended app behaviors.
PATH. ADB comes with the Android SDK.To use Capsule, you must have AndroidViewClient installed.
If you are just cloning this repo, you can either directly install AndroidViewClient by reading the instructions on dtmilano’s wiki or by:
$ sudo apt-get install python-setuptools # not needed on Ubuntu
$ sudo easy_install --upgrade androidviewclient
However, if you have installed Vanadium, you can import the luma and luma.third_party repositories by adding the luma manifest to your .jiri_manifest file or adding it to your manifest from the command line:
$ jiri import -name=manifest luma https://vanadium.googlesource.com/manifest && jiri update
After this, you will need to add the AndroidViewClient to your PYTHONPATH:
$ export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$JIRI_ROOT/release/projects/luma_third_party/AndroidViewClient/
Capsule automates Facebook and Google logins to allow the crawler to get through login procedures. Capsule prioritizes clicking on Facebook or Google login buttons, so installing/logging into Facebook and logging into a Google account allows the program to get beyond login screens.
Capsule can automatically fill in text fields according to their Android resource ids. Prepopulated fields with logical rules (such as differentiating between first and last name and using the zipcode config for views named ‘id/zip’ are already located in the config file, but it will also check for any fields that the user adds to the config in the extra info section.
If it does not match any of the fields in the config, it will type the text in the default field, so delete that field if you do not want text entry.
We recommend personalizing the config, especially since the default email address (foo@bar.com) has already been used (or blocked) to create accounts for most applications.
To modify the file without Git tracking it, type
$ git update-index --assume-unchanged <file>
We are happy to accept contributions. However, Vanadium does not accept pull requests, so you must follow the Vanadium contributing instructions. In addition, feel free to file issues on the luma issue tracker or contact the Capsule engineering lead, Dan Afergan.
This is not an official Google product.
Capsule is governed by BSD-style license found in the luma LICENSE file.
Capsule lives in the Vanadium codebase, but is no longer affiliated with Vanadium.