Test your app's activities

Activities serve as containers for every user interaction within your app, so it's important to test how your app's activities behave during device-level events such as the following:

  • Another app, such as the device's phone app, interrupts your app's activity.
  • The system destroys and recreates your activity.
  • The user places your activity in a new windowing environment, such as picture-in-picture (PIP) or multi-window.

In particular, it's important to ensure that your activity behaves correctly in response to the events described in The activity lifecycle.

This guide describes how to evaluate your app's ability to maintain data integrity and a good user experience as your app's activities transition through different states in their lifecycles.

Testing activities in Compose

When testing an app built with Jetpack Compose, you typically use createAndroidComposeRule to launch your activity and interact with your UI components.

However, testing device-level events, such as configuration changes or the activity being put into the background or destroyed by the system, requires you to manipulate the activity's lifecycle directly. To do this, you use the underlying ActivityScenario framework.

The Compose test rule automatically wraps and manages this scenario for you. Throughout this guide, you will see the following pattern used to bridge the gap between modern UI testing and standard lifecycle management:

@get:Rule
val composeTestRule = createAndroidComposeRule<MyActivity>()

@Test fun testEvent() {
    val scenario = composeTestRule.activityRule.scenario

    // ...
}

Drive an activity's state

One key aspect of testing your app's activities involves placing your app's activities in particular states. To define this "given" part of your tests, use instances of ActivityScenario, part of the AndroidX Test library. Using this class, you can place your activity in states that simulate device-level events.

ActivityScenario is a cross-platform API that you can use in local unit tests and on-device integration tests alike. On a real or virtual device, ActivityScenario provides thread safety, synchronizing events between your test's instrumentation thread and the thread that runs your activity under test.

The API is particularly well suited for evaluating how an activity under test behaves when it's destroyed or created. This section presents the most common use cases associated with this API.

Create an activity

To create the activity under test, add the code shown in the following snippet:

@RunWith(AndroidJUnit4::class)
class MyTestSuite {
    @Test fun testEvent() {
       launchActivity<MyActivity>().use {
       }
    }
}

After creating the activity, ActivityScenario transitions the activity to the RESUMED state. This state indicates that your activity is running and is visible to users. In this state, you're free to interact with your activity's composables using Compose testing APIs.

Google recommends that you call close on the activity when the test completes. This cleans up the associated resources and improves the stability of your tests. ActivityScenario implements Closeable, so you can apply the use extension so that the activity closes automatically.

Alternatively, you can use createAndroidComposeRule to automatically launch the activity before each test, handle teardown, and grant you access to both the Compose UI testing methods and the underlying ActivityScenario. The following example shows how to define a rule and get an instance of a scenario from it:

@RunWith(AndroidJUnit4::class)
class MyTestSuite {
    @get:Rule
    val composeTestRule = createAndroidComposeRule<MyActivity>()

    @Test fun testEvent() {
        val scenario = composeTestRule.activityRule.scenario
    }
}

Drive the activity to a new state

To drive the activity to a different state, such as CREATED or STARTED, call moveToState. This action simulates a situation where your activity is stopped or paused, respectively, because it's interrupted by another app or a system action.

An example usage of moveToState appears in the following code snippet:

@RunWith(AndroidJUnit4::class)
class MyTestSuite {
    @Test fun testEvent() {
        launchActivity<MyActivity>().use { scenario ->
            scenario.moveToState(State.CREATED)
        }
    }
}

Determine the current activity state

To determine the current state of an activity under test, get the value of the state field within your ActivityScenario object. It's particularly helpful to check the state of an activity under test if the activity redirects to another activity or finishes itself, as demonstrated in the following code snippet:

@RunWith(AndroidJUnit4::class)
class MyTestSuite {
    @Test fun testEvent() {
        launchActivity<MyActivity>().use { scenario ->
            scenario.onActivity { activity ->
              startActivity(Intent(activity, MyOtherActivity::class.java))
            }

            val originalActivityState = scenario.state
        }
    }
}

Recreate the activity

When a device is low on resources, the system might destroy an activity, requiring your app to recreate that activity when the user returns to your app. To simulate these conditions, call recreate:

@RunWith(AndroidJUnit4::class)
class MyTestSuite {
    @Test fun testEvent() {
        launchActivity<MyActivity>().use { scenario ->
            scenario.recreate()
        }
    }
}

The ActivityScenario class maintains the activity's saved instance state and any objects annotated using @NonConfigurationInstance. These objects load into the new instance of your activity under test.

Retrieve activity results

To get the result code or data associated with a finished activity, get the value of the result field within your ActivityScenario object. Using the createAndroidComposeRule, you can easily trigger the UI action that finishes the activity, as shown in the following code snippet:

@RunWith(AndroidJUnit4::class)
class MyTestSuite {
    @get:Rule
    val composeTestRule = createAndroidComposeRule<MyActivity>()

    @Test fun testResult() {
        composeTestRule.onNodeWithTag("finish_button").performClick()

        val scenario = composeTestRule.activityRule.scenario
        val resultCode = scenario.result.resultCode
        val resultData = scenario.result.resultData
    }
}

Trigger actions in the activity

All methods within ActivityScenario are blocking calls, so the API requires you to run them in the instrumentation thread.

To trigger actions in your activity under test, use Compose testing APIs to interact with your composables:

@RunWith(AndroidJUnit4::class)
class MyTestSuite {
    @get:Rule
    val composeTestRule = createAndroidComposeRule<MyActivity>()

    @Test fun testEvent() {
        composeTestRule.onNodeWithText("Refresh").performClick()
    }
}

If you need to call a method on the activity itself, however, you can do so safely by using onActivity:

@RunWith(AndroidJUnit4::class)
class MyTestSuite {
    @Test fun testEvent() {
        launchActivity<MyActivity>().use { scenario ->
            scenario.onActivity { activity ->
              activity.handleSwipeToRefresh()
            }
        }
    }
}

Additional resources

For more information about testing, see the following additional resources:

Documentation