uiautomator dump fails on apps with continuous animation

[srollly666]

Mobilewright version

0.0.33

Operating system

MacOS

Target platform

Android

Device or simulator

Pixel 9 Pro

Minimal reproduction

This is reproducible on any production app that doesn't stop animating

Actual behavior

#Claude Code analysis (Might help)
The first call that requires the view tree fails immediately with:

• RpcError: failed to dump UI from device Pixel_9_Pro: failed to get uiautomator dump: no XML content found in uiautomator dump

Stack:

• at MobilecliDriver.getViewHierarchy (node_modules/@mobilewright/driver-mobilecli/src/driver.ts:252:28)
• at Locator.pollUntilState (node_modules/@mobilewright/core/src/locator.ts:240:21)

Fails on apps with continuous animation

$ adb -s emulator-5554 shell uiautomator dump /sdcard/dump.xml
ERROR: could not get idle state.

Works

$ adb -s emulator-5554 shell uiautomator dump --compressed /sdcard/dump.xml
UI hierchary dumped to: /sdcard/dump.xml

4854 bytes of valid XML

Expected behavior

Any getByLabel / getByRole / getByText locator on Android should return the on-screen elements.

Additional context

No response

[gmegidish]

@srollly666 excellent bug! I will add it to the mobilewright-demo playground. So it's reproducible. We will ship a version soon that is able to dump ui even from never ending animations. I'll keep this bug open, and I'll link to the fix when it's available. Hopefully next week. Unfortunately, right now there's nothing we can do with uiautomator.

Can you please show an example of what kind of animation causes this?

[srollly666]

@gmegidish heres an example of carousel that happened is a part of the background

Screen.Recording.2026-05-12.at.5.25.53.PM.mov