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I am developing some automation on a game where I need to use the pinch zoom functionality (for more on multi-touch gestures see this Wikipedia article).

Solution possibilities I tried: Recording events and replaying them, but this is performing very slow through the ADB Shell (for example this GitHub).

That leaves me with my final question: How can somebody perform a pinch zoom in/out through a tool/library using Python?

J. M. Arnold
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bhappy
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1 Answers1

7

First option

The uiautomator by xiaocong. This library specifically supports two point gestures - see examples taken from the GitHub repo:

d(text="Settings").gesture((sx1, sy1), (sx2, sy2)) \
              .to((ex1, ey1), (ex2, ey2))

Moving from one point to another with two points.

Most importantly there is a specific pinch.in() and pinch.out() function. See:

d(text="Settings").pinch.In(percent=100, steps=10)
d(text="Settings").pinch.Out()

I can highly recommend this python wrapper due to it's detailed documentation as well as the functionality.

First off, install the uiautomator library:

pip install uiautomator

Little code snippet which I used for testing (this only works for Android 4.3 and on-going; "pinch can not be set until Android 4.3"):

from uiautomator import device as d

#Replace the variables, marked by the percentage signs 
d = Device('%serial_number%', adb_server_host='%server%', adb_server_port=%port%)

#[...]

#Zooming in - arbitrary example values for a "small zoom" in; from the edges to the center
d(text="Settings").pinch.In(percent=30, steps=10)

At this point I want to mention a note from the GitHub repo regarding %server%:

Although adb supports -a option since SDK 4.3, but now it has a bug on it. The only way to start adb server listenning on all interfaces instead of localhost, is adb -a -P 5037 fork-server server &

For further reading on this subject, I highly suggest a question from the Android Stackexchange (https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/52911/adb-start-server-and-listen-on-all-interfaces).

Second option

Doing my research I found another StackOverflow question which is highly related to your post: Fire a pinch in/out command to Android phone using adb - Even though this thread isn't specifically for Python, I'd highly suggest taking a look at it. User @Saurabh Meshram described in a detailed manner how to use getevent and sendevent in order to achieve a pinch in/out motion via adb. (Further sources: Check out this blogpost as well)

Though if I understood your initial question correct, you already tried this approach:

I have tried recording events

Still for the sake of completeness the second option should be mentioned. Anyhow, on to the third option:

Third option

Here comes a "tricky" solution. The python_api of the android_touch repo doesn't specifically support a pinch and zoom action per se. Though with the TouchActionBuilder you're allowed to construct complex actions as a pinch and zoom.

Depending on the motion you want to have you can combine either the down() or multidown() option with move() and multimove(). To achieve this I'd highly suggest taking a look at the code as well as the example of a "complex action".

Further reading and sources

J. M. Arnold
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