YouTube Android Player API - Programatically perform a click on "skip ad"

Question

Intro

I'm working in an android app that receives commands through http network commands (not through touch).

What I need to accomplish

I want to be able to, whenever a user instructs via http command that wants to perform a click on the skip add, programmatically instruct the youtube-player (embedded in my app), to skip the add.

Looking to the available functions I only can check if the player is showing the advertising or not, but nothing related to being able to skip it through a method.

How I'm trying to solve it

I'm trying to go via:

Get all child views and their childs of the activity
Figure out the view that I need to perform the click
Perform the click through view.performClick()

My problem is that it rarely shows advertising, meaning that I'm unable to complete the task or even know if this will work in a useful time.

Any ideas that can help to solve the main problem?

Thanks in advance.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:01

1

Ideally, Google can provide an api call that can allow skip ad as it is displayed on the screen "You can skip ad in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1s".

For the TV set top boxs, it has the same problem too. It is common for them not having a mouse, so you cannot move the cursor to the "skip ad" button and click.

My solution is to create a simulated touch event as you can find from this discussion: How to simulate a touch event in Android?.

The trick will be in calculating the x , y for the "skip ad" button though.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:01

Community

1
1

answered Feb 03 '17 at 03:40

tyolab

377
3
11

That's exactly how I did it but I don't like the solution. Anyway, it was the only one that I figured out. Thanks. – Eduardo Pinheiro Feb 13 '17 at 19:14

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 19 '18 at 22:17

I was able to find the view on runtime:

List<View> views = getAllChildrenBFS(mYouTubeView);
for (final View v: views) {
    if (v.toString().contains("skip_ad_button")){
        v.setFocusable(true);
        v.setFocusableInTouchMode(true);
        v.requestFocus();
        break;
    }
}

I set focus on the button, so the user can skip it.

(you can try using performClick though i'm not sure youtube will be very happy about this...)

The BFS search function:

private List<View> getAllChildrenBFS(View v) {
    List<View> visited = new ArrayList<View>();
    List<View> unvisited = new ArrayList<View>();
    unvisited.add(v);

    while (!unvisited.isEmpty()) {
        View child = unvisited.remove(0);
        visited.add(child);
        if (!(child instanceof ViewGroup)) continue;
        ViewGroup group = (ViewGroup) child;
        final int childCount = group.getChildCount();
        for (int i=0; i<childCount; i++) unvisited.add(group.getChildAt(i));
    }

    return visited;
}

Copied from: https://stackoverflow.com/a/18818750

Thanks to this wonderfull community and thank the lord!

YouTube Android Player API - Programatically perform a click on "skip ad"

2 Answers2