Documentation / Mobile phones

Test on Android

Prerequisites

Driving Android from Docker only works on a Linux host since there’s is no way at the moment to map USB on Mac!

Desktop

If you don’t use Docker you need to:

  • Install the Android SDK on your desktop (just the command line tools!). If you are on a Mac and use Homebrew just run: brew install android-platform-tools
  • Start the adb-server on your desktop: adb start-server

On your phone

  • Install Chrome
  • Enable developer USB access to your phone: Go to About device, tap it, scroll down to the Build number, tap it seven (7) times.
  • Disable screen lock on your device.
  • Enable Stay awake
  • Enable USB debugging in the device system settings, under Developer options.
  • Install the Stay Alive app and start it.
  • Plug in your phone using the USB port on your desktop computer.
  • When you plugin your phone, click OK on the “Allow USB debugging?” popup.

Run

You are now ready to test using your phone:

sitespeed.io --browsertime.chrome.android.package com.android.chrome https://www.sitespeed.io

Remember: To test on Android using Docker you need to be on Linux (tested on Ubuntu). It will not work on OS X.

docker run --privileged --shm-size=1g --rm -v "$(pwd)":/sitespeed.io sitespeedio/sitespeed.io --browsertime.xvfb false --browsertime.chrome.android.package com.android.chrome https://www.sitespeed.io

You will get result as you would with running this normally with summaries and waterfall graphs.

If you want test coming Chrome versions you can use com.chrome.beta for latest beta and com.chrome.dev for latest development version (make sure installed them on your phone first).

Connectivity

If you run by default, the phone will use the current connection. The connectivity flag is currently not supported (would love a PR for that!) but you can set connectivity by using TSProxy.

  1. Download TSProxy and make sure you have at least Python 2.7 installed.
  2. Check the local IP of your machine (in this example the IP is 10.0.1.7 and the default port for TSProxy is 1080).
  3. Start TSProxy and bind it to your IP: python tsproxy.py --bind 10.0.1.7 --rtt=200 --inkbps=1600 --outkbps=768
  4. Run $ sitespeed.io --browsertime.chrome.android.package com.android.chrome --browsertime.chrome.args proxy-server="socks://10.0.1.7:1080" https://www.sitespeed.io

You could also use phuedxs Pi Network Conditioner, but using that requires some additional work but more reliable metrics.

Video and SpeedIndex

You can also collect a video and get Visual Metrics. Running on Mac or without Docker you need to install the requirements for VisualMetrics yourself on your machine before you start. If you have everything setup you can run:

sitespeed.io --browsertime.chrome.android.package com.android.chrome --video --speedIndex https://www.sitespeed.io

And using Docker (remember: only works in Linux hosts):

docker run --privileged -v /dev/bus/usb:/dev/bus/usb -e START_ADB_SERVER=true --shm-size=1g --rm -v "$(pwd)":/sitespeed.io sitespeedio/sitespeed.io  -n 1 --browsertime.chrome.android.package com.android.chrome --browsertime.xvfb false https://www.sitespeed.io