Is it possible to stop an Android app from the console? Something like:
adb stop com.my.app.package
It would speed up our testing process so much. Right now we uninstall/install the app each time to make sure the manual test cases start with a clean state.
Edit: Long after I wrote this post and it was accepted as the answer, the am force-stop command was implemented by the Android team, as mentioned in this answer.
Alternatively: Rather than just stopping the app, since you mention wanting a "clean slate" for each test run, you can use adb shell pm clear com.my.app.package, which will stop the app process and clear out all the stored data for that app.
If you're on Linux:
adb shell ps -A | grep com.myapp | awk '{print $2}' | xargs adb shell kill
That will only work for devices/emulators where you have root immediately upon running a shell. That can probably be refined slightly to call su beforehand.
Otherwise, you can do (manually, or I suppose scripted):
pc $ adb -d shell
android $ su
android # ps
android # kill <process id from ps output>