How to Retrieve Android App Package Name and Activity for Automation Testing

Introduction

Anyone who has performed Android automation testing knows that the app's package name and main Activity are required, for example when configuring Appium's appPackage and appActivity capabilities.

This article introduces several ways to retrieve these values.

What are package name and Activity?

The package name uniquely identifies an Android app on the system; two apps may share a display name but cannot share the same package name. An Activity represents a single screen in the app, and the first screen launched is often called the launch Activity.

Methods

ADB

The simplest method is to run the following commands on a connected device:

adb shell

dumpsys activity | grep mFocusedActivity

UIAutomatorViewer

When only the package name is needed, launch uiautomatorviewer , open the target app, take a screenshot, and read the package name from the UI hierarchy.

Inspect source code

In Android Studio, open the Project Structure → Flavors panel and view the Application Id, which is the package name. If it is empty, open AndroidManifest.xml and read the package attribute. The launch Activity can be found by locating the android.intent.action.MAIN and android.intent.category.LAUNCHER intent filters and reading the android:name attribute.

Appium

After installing Appium, go to its settings page, select the APK file, and Appium will display the corresponding package name and Activity.

AAPT

Use the aapt command-line tool to dump the APK's manifest and extract the package and activity information.

These five approaches are quick and convenient; other techniques such as decompiling, logcat, Monkey scripts, etc., can also be used according to personal preference.

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