Allow for testing BroadcastReceivers on Android

[andre-artus]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Some of my use cases are initiated from a broadcast (i.e. implements a BroadcastReceiver). I would like to automate the tests for these receivers.

Describe the solution you'd like
Some mechanism to initiate or simulate a broadcast (Local or System), or call adb to do it and check the result.
I would like to test when the following are sent:

• correct broadcast (data/params)
• incorrect broadcast ,
• multiple concurrent broadcast (attempt to overload)
  Also
• no ANR
• What happens when app is in non-interrupt state (e.g. user filling in a form) and intent is broadcast
• Behaviour under Doze, standby or process death.
• Test order of broadcast receipt (if dependent on order).

I'm sure I'm leaving something out, but that should cover a lot of it.

Describe alternatives you've considered
I'm currently just using scripts calling into ADB with a variety of known values and logging the interactions.

[amanjeetsingh150]

Hey @andre-artus can you explain the detailed use case you are looking at? What type of behavior do you want to verify in the maestro test?

[MaaxGr]

We use broadcast Intents to simulate the behaviour of the physical scan engine on enterprise devices (as Zebra TC58) on emulators:

Example: Send Barcode "test" to our application:
adb shell am broadcast -a de.guettlerlogistik.hallenapp.scan --es barcode "test" de.guettlerlogistik.hallenapp

That should also be supported with maestro. :)

Have a great week.

Max

[andre-artus]

Sorry, @amanjeetsingh150 , I failed to respond to you (I don;t know if I missed the notification) but Max's examples is very similar to ours (scanner or other accessories on enterprise devices).

[MaaxGr]

@andre-artus How did you solved it with scripts calling into ADB. Can you share an example?

[bartekpacia]

Hey all,

This seems to a bit of a more niche use case, and we're a small team busy with other work streams rn, so I cannot share any timeline on when we will implement it. That said if anyone decided to contribute this feature, we're always happy to review PRs.

Notes:

• this would be Android-only. Normally we try to avoid such features in Maestro, but I'm not aware of any iOS equivalent. I think it'd be fine, it's a very valid feature request.

[LukStankovic]

Yes, this feature would be extremely useful for my workflow too, as I need to test an application on a Zebra scanner 🙏🏻