I went to use hierarchyviewer and recieved the following message:
"The standalone version of hieararchyviewer is deprecated. Please use Android Device Monitor (tools/monitor) instead."
So, I started up Android Device Monitor in Android Studio and could only find
"Dump View Hierarchy for UI Automator"
and it launches uiautomatorviewer in the Device Monitor...
Does anyone know if this means Google is intending to replace hierarchyviewer with uiautomatorviewer?
I used to use the hierarchyviewer in combination with monkeyrunner to do UI testing for android devices. Unfortunately, monkeyrunner was slow and limited and the tests were brittle.
I see the uiautomator as the better tool for inspecting UI elements. It has more powerful methods to identify UI objects and interact with them. You no longer need to place sleep commands in your script. Just wait for a specific element. You can wait for an element to appear or disappear.
You can have watchers which run in case an UI object is not found. This can be helpful when handling pop-ups and error messages.
Here's a link to a tutorial. http://developer.android.com/tools/testing/testing_ui.html
I did not see any official statement that says one replaces the other, but I think upgrading to uiautomator is the sensible thing to do. Hierarchyviewer and monkeyrunner are deprecated after all.