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The Android Device Monitor is a powerful tool for controlling our device. In this video we'll see some of the more useful features and go over how to use them.
* With the new Android emulator the emulator control tab is greyed out and inaccessible. It's functionality has been moved to 'Extended controls' pop up which is accessed through the ' . . . ' on the toolbar next to the emulator.
Resources
Another important tool in our arsenal
is the Android Device Monitor.
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From the Android Device Monitor, we can
take screenshots, spoof incoming calls and
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texts, spoof location data and much more.
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And actually,
ever since Android Studio 2.0,
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a lot of these functionality can
be done right from the emulator.
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But there's still a few good reasons
to use the Android Device Monitor.
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To open it click on Tools >
Android > Android Device Monitor.
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Once it's open, we can click on our device
on the side bar on the left to select it,
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but for now let's leave this behind and
jump back to the emulator.
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One of the cool things we can do from
here is, send fake phone calls and
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text messages to our virtual device.
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Testing how an app responds
to incoming phone calls and
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text messages, is an important
part of the testing process.
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You wouldn't want your music player
to keep playing during a phone call.
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So if we click over here on the three
dots, and then click on phone,
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we can type in an arbitrary number,
Like 123456789 and
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then send this text message to our device.
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Look I got a text.
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Cool, and if you wanted to call
the device with that number,
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you just click the call device button.
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Hey, now's not really a good time for
a phone call.
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Another cool thing we can do from here is
set the location of our virtual device
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by specifying a latitude and longitude.
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An easy way to get latitude and longitude
information is by using Google Maps.
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Just find a location you're interested in,
let's say Tokyo,
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Then right click on the map and
select what's here,
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to have Google Maps show
you the coordinates.
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Now you can copy and paste in
the first coordinate, As the latitude,
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On the location tab, And
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copy and paste in the second
coordinate as the longitude.
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Then when you hit send, Android will
start to think your device is in Tokyo.
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To check this, all we need to do, is go
home and since for our virtual device we
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decided to include the Google APIs, we can
just click in here, go to Google Maps,
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And click on the Where am I button.
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And awesome, it thinks we're in Tokyo.
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Another thing you might wanna
change while your app is running,
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is the network speed and latency.
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We saw earlier how we can set these
as properties of our virtual device.
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But changing them from in here,
on the Cellular tab,
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let us modify the network speed and
latency in real time.
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Let's test it out.
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I'm going to go to Google Images,
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And look up pictures of alpaca,
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Looks like that loaded pretty quickly.
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Now let's change the speed
of our network to EDGE,
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which is a little slower than 3G,
and refresh the page.
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Wow, this is taking a lot longer to load.
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Being able to change network settings
on the fly is a useful feature for
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making sure an app handles
network transitions gracefully.
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And being able to test your app on a
really slow network is a great way to see
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what some of your users
might be dealing with.
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While this keeps loading, another useful
thing we can do right from the emulator,
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is take screenshots.
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This can be useful for gathering
screenshots on many different types
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of device to use in a listing
on the Google Play Store.
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We can take a screen shot by clicking
on the camera icon over here.
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Also, taking a screenshot
might take a few seconds.
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That's because it takes the screenshot
at the full resolution of your
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virtual device.
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Just like if you were taking
a screen shot on an actual device.
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Also, the screenshots should
be stored on your computer.
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For me on a Mac,
it puts it in the Desktop folder.
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Getting back to the Android Device
Monitor, one thing we still can't do
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directly from the emulator is manage
the files on our virtual device.
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Let's click on the file explorer tab,
to see what we can do.
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On the top right, we have options to pull
files from the device to our computer,
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push files from our computer to the
device, delete files and add new folders.
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I really like that picture
I took in the last video.
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Let's see how I would
pull onto my computer.
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Start by expanding the storage folder,
and then emulated, and then zero.
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And let me give a little more
room to this name column.
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These should be the folders you're
familiar with seeing if you've ever used
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a File Explorer on your Android device.
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And to find that picture
I took with the camera,
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we just need to go into the DCIM
folder and then the camera folder.
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Then I'll highlight my file and
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click to pull it from
the device to my computer.
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And that's a fine place to put it.
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And now, it's on my computer.
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Hopefully, you now have a better
idea of how to make the most
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of the Android emulator.
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It really is a powerful tool for
thoroughly testing your apps.
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