Stopping an Android app from console

Question

Is it possible to stop an Android app from the console? Something like:

adb stop com.my.app.package

It would speed up our testing process so much. Right now we uninstall/install the app each time to make sure the manual test cases start with a clean state.

Answer 1

If all you are looking for is killing a package

pkill package_name 

should work

Answer 2

If you target a non-rooted device and/or have services in you APK that you don't want to stop as well, the other solutions won't work.

To solve this problem, I've resorted to a broadcast message receiver I've added to my activity in order to stop it.

public class TestActivity extends Activity {
    private static final String STOP_COMMAND = "com.example.TestActivity.STOP";

    private BroadcastReceiver broadcastReceiver = new BroadcastReceiver() {
        @Override
        public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
            TestActivity.this.finish();
        }
    };

    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

        //other stuff...

        registerReceiver(broadcastReceiver, new IntentFilter(STOP_COMMAND));
    }
}

That way, you can issue this adb command to stop your activity:

adb shell am broadcast -a com.example.TestActivity.STOP

Answer 3

adb shell killall -9 com.your.package.name

according to MAC "mandatory access control" you probably have the permission to kill process which is not started by root

have fun!

Answer 4

First, put the app into the background (press the device's home button)

Then....in a terminal....

adb shell am kill com.your.package

Answer 5

you can use the following from the device console: pm disable com.my.app.package which will kill it. Then use pm enable com.my.app.package so that you can launch it again.

Answer 6

Edit: Long after I wrote this post and it was accepted as the answer, the am force-stop command was implemented by the Android team, as mentioned in this answer.

Alternatively: Rather than just stopping the app, since you mention wanting a "clean slate" for each test run, you can use adb shell pm clear com.my.app.package, which will stop the app process and clear out all the stored data for that app.

---

If you're on Linux:
adb shell ps | grep com.myapp | awk '{print $2}' | xargs adb shell kill

That will only work for devices/emulators where you have root immediately upon running a shell. That can probably be refined slightly to call su beforehand.

Otherwise, you can do (manually, or I suppose scripted):
pc $ adb -d shell
android $ su
android # ps
android # kill <process id from ps output>