Facebook Releases New Open Source Android Debugging Tool

Friday, February 20, 2015

Facebook has released a new open source debugging tool for Android it dubs Stetho. This is Facebook’s first Android open source project in 2015, and the company is looking for feedback on the platform’s GitHub page.

Here is what Josh Guilfoyle said on the Facebook engineering blog about the new release:

Part of moving fast at Facebook means investing in good tooling. At our scale, we aim to have tools that let engineers not only quickly discover problems and fix them, but also help model behavior to move efficiently through a large code base. Lack of a solution for this need led us, like a lot of other Android developers, to a fair number of inconsistently maintained internal UIs, circumstantial and hard-to-interpret Log statements, not to mention many painful sessions with the Java debugger.

We think there is a better way

It's hard not to look longingly at the fine state of tools available for web developers, particularly the Chrome Developer Tools suite. This conveniently integrated tool is accessible with a quick keyboard shortcut and offers rich visualizations that benefit from deep integration with the browser core.

But what about Android? Today, we're open-sourcing a powerful new debugging platform for Android called Stetho. With it, developers can unlock much richer and more convenient access to data. And the best part: We use Chrome Developer Tools to serve the UI!

Read more: https://github.com/facebook/stetho