Okay, so yesterday I was messing around with Instagram, trying to automate some stuff, and the first thing I wanted to do was grab a screenshot when a specific symbol appeared in a story. Seemed simple enough, right?
First, I thought, “I’ll just use Python.” I mean, it’s my go-to for pretty much everything. I started by looking for libraries that could interact with Instagram. Found a few, but a lot of them were outdated or needed an API key, which I didn’t have and didn’t really want to deal with.
Then I realized, “Wait a minute, I can use ADB!” (Android Debug Bridge). I already had it set up for other projects. So, I figured I could just script the phone directly. Here’s what I did:
Install ADB: If you don’t have it, you gotta download the Android SDK Platform Tools. Pretty straightforward, just Google it.
Connect your phone: Enable USB debugging in your phone’s developer options (Google that too if you haven’t already). Connect the phone to your computer.
Verify ADB connection: Open your terminal or command prompt and type adb devices. You should see your device listed.
Cool, ADB was working. Now, the tricky part: detecting the symbol. My initial thought was to use image recognition. I took a screenshot of the symbol I wanted to detect using ADB: adb shell screencap -p /sdcard/*, then pulled it to my computer with adb pull /sdcard/* *.
Then I tried OpenCV with Python to find the symbol in the screenshot. Something like this:
import cv2
symbol = *('*', *_GRAYSCALE)
screen = *('*', *_GRAYSCALE)
result = *(screen, symbol, *_CCOEFF_NORMED)
min_val, max_val, min_loc, max_loc = *(result)
if max_val > 0.8: # Adjust threshold as needed
print("Symbol found!")
else:
print("Symbol not found.")
But, here’s the thing: the Instagram interface is always changing slightly, and the symbol’s size and position vary. This made the image recognition super unreliable. It worked sometimes, but mostly failed.
So, I ditched the image recognition idea. Too fragile. I needed a more robust solution. I thought about accessibility services. Android has built-in accessibility features that allow you to inspect the UI elements on the screen.
I remembered UIAutomatorViewer, which comes with the Android SDK. It lets you see the UI hierarchy of whatever’s on your screen. I fired it up, connected my phone, and started poking around Instagram’s UI.
Bingo! I found that the symbol I was looking for was actually a text element with a specific content description (accessibility label). This was way easier! I could just check for that text using ADB and uiautomator.
Here’s the final script I came up with (simplified for sharing):
import subprocess
import time
def check_symbol():
result = *_output(['adb', 'shell', 'uiautomator dump']).decode('utf-8')
break # Or sleep for a while if you want to catch multiple occurrences
else:
print("Symbol not found. Checking again...")
*(5) # Check every 5 seconds
Basically, the script uses uiautomator dump to get a dump of the UI hierarchy, then searches for the specific text in the output. If it finds it, it takes a screenshot and exits (or you can modify it to keep checking). If not, it waits and tries again.
Important: Replace 'YourSymbolContentDescription' with the actual content description of the symbol you want to detect. You can find this using UIAutomatorViewer.
It ain’t pretty, but it works! This method is way more reliable than image recognition because it relies on the underlying UI structure, not just the visual appearance.
Lessons Learned:
ADB is your friend.
Don’t overcomplicate things with image recognition if you can avoid it.
Accessibility services can be a goldmine for automation.
UIAutomatorViewer is a lifesaver.
That’s it! Hope this helps someone trying to do something similar. It’s a bit of a hack, but sometimes those are the best solutions!
