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I want to get my hands dirty with app automation so I've been playing around with learning Appium (if anybody has any good tutorials send em my way!). I have an app on my local machine that I'm wanting to use for testing purposes.

The app is one I've created with c# and Xamarin Forms so I have all the files and the .apk locally.

I found a video that said you could use the chrome://inspect page to view apps in an emulator and even inspect them. When my app is running (starting it via Visual Studio) I can see it pop up in the device list but I don't have the option to inspect it.

I'm not sure how people feel about pictures but I don't really have any code to post so I'll just show you that the app is, indeed, running and what I see on the chrome devices page.

Here is my app running enter image description here

And here is the device list from chrome. You can see the emulator there but I can't do anything with it enter image description here

What am I missing here?

user1818298
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    Usually, this happens because there are no inspectable webviews in the application. Chrome inspect view can be used only if there is a webview in the active application screen. Can you validate that if this screen is a web view? – debugger89 Sep 08 '20 at 13:18
  • Ah ok. That makes sense. I do not have a webview around anything. Guess I'll have to look that up as I'm not even familiar with what it is :) Thanks! – user1818298 Sep 09 '20 at 00:35

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Chrome://Inspect is a part of Chrome Dev Tools that lets you see port forwarded web views from the mobile in a desktop browser. This is because we cannot inspect elements in Chrome mobile (something we do in desktop browser with CTRL+SHIFT+I) and we have to forward the chrome mobile window to chrome desktop.

To inspect element, if you're working on a web page or web application, just simply right click on that page and choose Inspect

And in your case, for inspecting Android application (apk), you should use UiAutomatorViewer, AppiumStudio, Katalon mobile spy, etc... Here is my answer to similar question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/58204262/7302505

Mohammad Monfared
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