How do you disable animations at the system level for an android device/emulator using adb with API 23?

Issue

Based on reading, the values window_animation_scale, transition_animation_scale and animator_duration_scale need to be set to 0

The following works for API 22 but not for API 23:

adb shell settings put global window_animation_scale 0.0

Even the below command did not work for API 23

adb shell content update --uri content://settings/system --bind value:s:0.0 --where 'name="window_animation_scale"'

We want to disable animations to prevent flaky visual test failures only. We do not want to introduce this logic in the application and hence want to apply it at the system level rather than through the application.

Solution

The adb shell settings commands are good enough. It is just that you have to do a clean reboot for these settings to come into effect.

The key to the solution is to do a clean reboot after you have changed the settings. sudo reboot is what you have to avoid and embrace $ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools/adb shell “su 0 am start -a android.intent.action.REBOOT”

I have also written a blog on the same issue.

Answered By - Sagar Maurya