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