Guide · 8 min read
Android is the fragmentation problem personified. Ten OEM skins, thirty OEM-specific accessibility quirks, and Google's own UiAutomator2 occasionally lagging the platform. Here's how Anvil's KAD driver holds ground.
KAD (Koydo Android Driver) runs as a test-orchestrator APK plus a user-installed Accessibility Service. The orchestrator drives UiAutomator2 for taps, gestures, and widget queries; the Accessibility Service fills the gaps — fine-grained text selection, dynamic content announcements, TalkBack-mode navigation, cross-app launcher interactions.
You get the same 82 verbs you'd use on iOS. The spec file is identical. device: any-android swaps in for device: any-ios and the test is write-once.
KAD is regression-tested against the current-generation Samsung One UI, Google Pixel UI, Xiaomi HyperOS, OPPO ColorOS, and the last two generations of each. The test matrix is public — you can see which OEM × Android version pairs we guarantee and which are best-effort.
For Samsung specifically, the Accessibility Service handles the Secure Folder quirk (accessibility events are dropped when the active profile changes). The driver catches the drop and resumes automatically — you don't write code for this.
From the CLI:
anvil devices add --android --serial <adb-serial> anvil devices install-driver --device <serial> anvil devices ready --device <serial>
The install-driver command sideloads the signed driver APK, prompts for Accessibility Service permission, and verifies the handshake. Once ready, every run dispatches over ADB-tunneled TCP (no public network exposure) and exchanges the same JWT flavor the iOS driver uses.
Anvil captures a perfetto system trace during every run. Frame times, GPU fence waits, binder IPC volume, scheduler latency — all pinned to the verb that was in flight. You get a timeline where "the scroll stuttered between 3.2s and 3.4s" links directly to thescrollDown verb and the binder transaction that held the UI thread.
Video recording is still there — but you rarely need it. The replay + trace is better evidence than a video of the same run.
Most teams we work with already have a device lab — a shelf of real hardware accumulated across release cycles. KAD registers them in place: plug the device into any machine with ADB and the orchestrator discovers it within seconds. No dedicated Selenium grid server to run.
For devices you don't own, the Anvil shared fleet fills in. Pricing is per run, not per minute — an economic difference that compounds at fleet scale.
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