openstf / STFService.apk

Monitor and perform various actions on your Android device. Not meant for actual user devices.
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Can STF allow manual actions on multiple devices #12

Closed saikrishna321 closed 7 years ago

saikrishna321 commented 7 years ago

@sorccu

Use Case:

Action done on one device should reflect on all the connected client devices. Is this possible?

sorccu commented 7 years ago

It's possible but too much effort.

Think about it. Let's say you have a Galaxy S6, a Nexus 5X, a Xiaomi Mi 5 and a Nexus 9. You're in the home screen. User presses the Chrome icon on Nexus 5X.

What is supposed to happen? All these devices have different resolutions. They have different skins. Pressing the same relative coordinate on each device is possible, but there's no guarantee that it'll press the same thing on each device.

You could inspect the view hierarchy, but then you run into other issues. Perhaps the Chrome icon is not even visible? What do you do, randomly swipe left/right/up/down and hope to find it? On the S6, the icon is for a Samsung browser, not Chrome, what do you do? On the Xiaomi, you don't even have Chrome installed at all, what do you do?

Now think about differences between alerts, permission prompts, system notifications, apps with responsive layouts responding to differences in real estate, and you have a recipe for a disaster. It's borderline impossible to do it reliably, much less in real time. Companies with tens of millions in revenue still have not fully solved this problem.

Now think that we work on this project for free on our own time. Do you think we're going to have time to make it?

Pull requests are accepted.

On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 15:34 Sai Krishna notifications@github.com wrote:

@sorccu https://github.com/sorccu

Use Case:

Action done on one device should reflect on all the connected client devices. Is this possible?

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saikrishna321 commented 7 years ago

@sorccu appreciate the explanation. I'm sure there is lot of time that needs to get in. Thanks for this awesome project build :)