Comments on: Enabling HierarchyViewer on Rooted Android Devices

By: Geo

Geo — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 08:02:20 +0000

Thanks! This is great and helps a lot!

By: jayenoh

jayenoh — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 13:54:53 +0000

Great trick! Thanks!

By: Maxim Rahlis

Maxim Rahlis — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 17:20:21 +0000

AWESOME! Thanks! Worked perfectly for my Galaxy SII 4.0.3 and on my Galaxy S4 4.2.2.

Keep on the good work!

By: John

John — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 21:26:12 +0000

I’ve had great success with your patch on ICS devices (thank you!). It seems, however, that this does not work for Gingerbread devices (I’ve tried on a Nexus One). It fails at the step where dexopt-wrapper is to be used, with message:

— BEGIN ‘./services_hacked.jar’ (bootstrap=0) —
— waiting for verify+opt, pid=6785
— would reduce privs here
— END ‘./services_hacked.jar’ — status=0x000b, process failed

I’ve noticed, for one, that WindowManagerService lives in services, not services/wm for GB devices, and that the smali file is slightly different (for example, :goto_25 instead of :goto_21.

Any ideas on how to get this working for Gingerbread devices?

By: davtbaum

davtbaum — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 17:17:41 +0000

@Dave thanks for the clarification.

I am aware of Romain’s ViewServer plugin. It’s a nice tool, although I found it much easier to just patch the services.jar on our test devices and use HierarchyViewer with non-debuggable apps.

By: Dave Smith (@devunwired)

Dave Smith (@devunwired) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 16:02:38 +0000

“I personally had no idea what Android meant by this statement, so we spent some time investigating the implementation of the ViewServer in Android OS”

It means the Android ROM was built using the “userdebug” or “eng” configuration flag rather than the “user” flag from the lunch menu. Most custom or ported ROMs (which is often what users of a rooted device end up installing) have these features enabled already.

Also, Romain’s comments were made in 2010, prior to his later release of ViewServer as a drop-in project that can be run on any device 3.1 and later: https://github.com/romainguy/ViewServer