Unlocking an Android Emulator with a pin lock set - appium & mitmdump

When running Appium tests against Android Lollipop (API 22) (5.1), you might need to unlock the device using a passcode or password. My use case was using mitmdump to proxy traffic from the emulator to my locally running backend service. In order to do this, you need to install a root certificate on the emulator, which requires you to set a pin / password. On Android Marshmallow (API 23 ) (6.0), it allows you to immediately take this off, however Lollipop doesn’t.

The easiest way I found to unlock the emulator before running tests against it is to run the below shell commands through Jenkins just before we kick off the tests.

adb shell input keyevent KEYCODE_MENU
adb shell input keyevent KEYCODE_9
adb shell input keyevent KEYCODE_9
adb shell input keyevent KEYCODE_9
adb shell input keyevent KEYCODE_9
adb shell input keyevent KEYCODE_ENTER

Obviously, substituting the KEYCODE values for your pin / password.

There’s a complete list of KeyCode values here: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/KeyEvent.html