Your first script in 10 minutes

By the end of this page you will have run a script on your phone, read its output, and made AppsMobs tap a button you captured yourself. ⏱ 10 minutes.

1. 1

   Open the Playground

   Click Playground in the sidebar, under Build. This is where you write your scripts.

   1

   A welcome screen asks What do you want to automate? and offers four choices: Start from an example, Build with blocks, Describe it to the AI, Open a script. For this tutorial, click Or start from a blank page.

   You now see the code editor, with the script name at the top (New script, mark 1), the Code / Blocks switch (mark 2), the Run on selector (mark 3) and the Run (mark 4), Stop (mark 5), Save (mark 6) buttons.

   123456

2. 2

   Write a first script without images

   Make sure the Code mode is active (at the top, next to Blocks). Click in the code area and type this:

   log("Script started")
   press_home()
   wait(2)
   log("Back on the home screen")
   

   What these lines do:

   • log("...") writes a message in the Output panel. It is your way of seeing what the script does.
   • press_home() presses the phone's Home button.
   • wait(2) waits 2 seconds. The number is in seconds.

   There is nothing to import: functions like log or press_home are already known to the Playground. They are all explained in the function reference.

3. 3

   Choose the device

   Click Run on (the device selector, in the middle of the top bar). A Run the script on window opens with the list of your devices.

   Tick your phone. Your choice is remembered for next runs. If you tick nothing, AppsMobs asks which device at each run.

   If the list is empty, the message is No device connected. Plug a phone in over USB (USB debugging on) or start an emulator.: go back to Connect a phone or an emulator.

4. 4

   Run the script

   Click Run (or press F5).

   What happens: the Output panel opens at the bottom. First you see Launching on followed by your device name, then your messages, each one preceded by the time. On the phone, the home screen shows up.

   How to know it worked: the status goes from Starting… to Running on and then Finished in followed by the duration. While it runs, you can click Stop (Shift + F5) to interrupt it.

   The full detail stays available in the Console: the Open the app Console button of the Output panel takes you there.

   You can still read the output later

   Copy the output copies the text, Clear empties the panel. At the next run, a line separates old lines from new ones.

5. 5

   Save the script

   Press Ctrl + S (or click Save). A save window opens (its title is in French, Sauvegarder le script AppsMobs), already placed in your scripts folder: Documents\AppsMobs\Scripts.

   Give it a name, for example my_first_script.py, and confirm. Under the script name, Not saved yet is replaced by the file path.

   Keep this folder in mind: it is where you will put the button image in the next step.

6. 6

   Capture the phone screen

   To tap a button, the script needs a small picture of that button. On your phone, show the screen that contains the button you want to tap (any clearly visible button, for example an icon on the home screen).

   In the Playground, click the ⋯ button (More actions) on the right of the top bar, then, in the Tools group, Device screenshot. The shortcut is F9.

   If several devices are plugged in, a window asks which one to capture. Otherwise the capture starts right away.

   A Screenshot saved window appears with the file name and the question Open the screenshot in Paint to crop?. Click Yes.

   The whole capture is saved in your screenshots folder (Documents\AppsMobs\Screenshots), under a name like device-id_date.png.

7. 7

   Crop the button and save it next to the script

   In Paint:

   1. Click the Select tool, then draw a rectangle around only the button, as tight as possible.
   2. Click Crop. Only the button remains.
   3. Choose File, Save as, PNG picture.
   4. Go to Documents\AppsMobs\Scripts (your script's folder) and name the file button.png.

   A good image

   • Take the button alone, without the background around it. A small, very recognisable piece works better than a large area.
   • Avoid parts that change (a counter, a date).
   • Take the capture on a device with the same resolution as the one that will run the script.
   • The name must end with .png and you write it exactly as is in the script (capitals included).

   Where to put the file: AppsMobs looks for the image first in the script's folder, then in Documents\AppsMobs\Scripts\img. Either works. If you save it in neither, the script stops with an error message (see below).

8. 8

   Make it tap the button

   Go back to the Playground. Replace the script content with:

   log("Looking for the button")
   if tap_image("button.png", timeout=15):
       log("Button tapped")
   else:
       log("Button not found after 15 seconds")
   

   • tap_image("button.png", timeout=15) waits up to 15 seconds for the image to appear, then taps it. It answers true if the button was tapped, false otherwise.
   • if ... else ... chooses what to do depending on the answer. The lines indented by 4 spaces under if and else are the ones that run in each case.

   Press Ctrl + S, then Run.

   How to know it worked: on the phone, the button is tapped, and the Output shows Button tapped.

The same script with a text instead of an image

If the button carries a text that Android can read, you do not need an image:

log("Waiting for the text")
if wait_text("Settings", timeout=15):
    tap_text("Settings")
    log("Text tapped")
else:
    log("Text not found")

wait_text waits for an element to display this text, tap_text taps it. Text drawn inside an image (common in games) cannot be read this way: use tap_image then.

Repeating an action

Add a loop to start over. This example is the one from the Playground (welcome screen, Start from an example), with your image:

for i in range(10):
    log(f"Round {i + 1}/10")
    tap_image("button.png")
    wait(2)

log("Done!")

for i in range(10) repeats the indented lines ten times. Here tap_image waits for the image (30 seconds by default) before the next round.

Not working?

What next

• Build without code: the block editor: the same thing by dragging blocks.
• Writing a Python script: the rules, the images, good habits.
• Function reference: the 87 available functions.