Developer builds text-based Android test runner to cut AI agent screenshot costs

A developer building an Android app with Claude Code found that AI agents testing apps via repeated screenshots were slow, expensive, and error-prone due to high image-token consumption. To address this, they created a lightweight Python test runner that uses Android's uiautomator dump to describe on-screen elements as text rather than images. The tool lets an AI agent write test scenarios once as JSON files and execute them with a single command, only resorting to screenshots when visual decisions are genuinely required. The runner handles real-world edge cases such as stale UI dumps, password field input bugs, foreground-stealing apps, and unreliable airplane mode behaviour. The open-source project, released under the MIT licence, is available on GitHub and requires no additional software installed on the device.