I am looking to find out whether or not it is possible to determine if the screen is on on an android device using ADB. I need to know this for some tests I am trying to run using monkey runner. Is there a shell command I can enter, and thus include as part of a monkey runner command, that will tell me definitively if the screen is on or off?
In doing some testing I've found that using adb shell dumpsys power | grep mScreenOn will work on devices that have a version number of 4.2+
The command that I have found to work on all devices I have tested so far is to use:
adb shell dumpsys input_method | grep mScreenOn
which will produce something like:
mSystemReady=true mScreenOn=true
which you can use to determine if the screen is on.
Tested on all Android Emulators in the range 2.2 - 4.4.2, Samsung Galaxy SII (4.0.4), Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 (4.0.4), and Nexus 4 with CM11
Also worth mentioning, on pre 4.2 devices you can use the command adb shell dumpsys power | grep mPowerState to get something like this:
mIsPowered=true mPowerState=3 mScreenOffTime=24970 ms
mPowerState=SCREEN_BRIGHT_BIT SCREEN_ON_BIT
and detect if the SCREEN_ON_BIT string is present