activities stack

Question

Is there a way to vizualise the activity stack, at some moment during debug, or normal run ?

Answer 1

On the emulator or in a rooted phone you can use the dumpsys shell command

adb shell dumpsys activity

which outputs the existing tasks. Here a little snippet

Running activities (most recent first):
TaskRecord{407d8a30 #6 A com.actionbarsherlock.sample.demos}
  Run #2: HistoryRecord{40792ec8 com.actionbarsherlock.sample.demos/.ActionItems}
  Run #1: HistoryRecord{40735008 com.actionbarsherlock.sample.demos/.SampleList}
TaskRecord{406de0b8 #2 A com.android.launcher}
  Run #0: HistoryRecord{405802c8 com.android.launcher/com.android.launcher2.Launcher}

You can even see the intent that started the activity

TaskRecord{407d8a30 #6 A com.actionbarsherlock.sample.demos}
clearOnBackground=false numActivities=2 rootWasReset=true
affinity=com.actionbarsherlock.sample.demos
intent={act=android.intent.action.MAIN cat=[android.intent.category.LAUNCHER] flg=0x10200000 cmp=com.actionbarsherlock.sample.demos/.SampleList}
realActivity=com.actionbarsherlock.sample.demos/.SampleList
lastActiveTime=1492068 (inactive for 2s)
* Hist #2: HistoryRecord{40792ec8 com.actionbarsherlock.sample.demos/.ActionItems}
    packageName=com.actionbarsherlock.sample.demos processName=com.actionbarsherlock.sample.demos
    launchedFromUid=10040 app=ProcessRecord{40650b68 1840:com.actionbarsherlock.sample.demos/10040}
    Intent { cmp=com.actionbarsherlock.sample.demos/.ActionItems }

To extract only the Tasks, I use grep

adb shell dumpsys activity | grep "Running activities" -A 10

Source: http://www.slideshare.net/RanNachmany/manipulating-android-tasks-and-back-stack