Android Development Gotchas

An unordered list of counter-intuitive problems and hard-won solutions (that sort of thing) for Android Development.

Get Target Context During Instrumented (on-phone) Tests

How to get the same Context as your app under test was oddly hard for me, since the API 23 update.

In a method annotated with @Test or @Before:

import android.support.test.InstrumentationRegistry;
import android.content.Context;

public class TestWithContext {

...

    @Before
    public void before() {
    Context context = InstrumentationRegistry.getTargetContext();
    }
}

Waiting for some time in Android

(instead of Java's Thread.sleep(long ms) )

This hidden gem says to do this:

SystemClock.sleep(long ms)