Stetho Reviews & Product Details

Stetho is one of the best tools that can help you with your development process. It lets you do multiple things from peeking on your network traffic to checking your storage and shared preferences. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is nothing I dislike about the tool. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I think the easiest way about Stetho is the integration on your apps. Network inspection is one of the coolest things that I've ever seen since I am Android Developer. I also use Database Inspection. It is a way to check all the data stored by your app in realtime. Then, you can debug your app to see if the app shows everything required. It could be like another sort of tests. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I dislike that when you run your app this time is longer. I don't use too much dumpapp, Javascript Console or View Hierarchy. View Hierarchy has the same tool on the latest version of Android Studio. For that reason I don't use it. I tried but I prefer to have this tool integrated in my current IDE. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I use Stetho mostly for database inspection when developing android application.

It does have more features like view hierarchy, network inspection but I rarely use them.

What I like the most about Stetho is that you can view all the tables that your app has created in a matter of seconds. it loads them relatively fast. Therefore, it is especially useful when you want to validate database migration or want to check for specific group of data in certain order. Also, if one is working on network heavy application, network inspection tool can help to optimize network calls. It supports chrome development tool features. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The database inspection lags on startup and it can slow down devices. However, it is bearable.

The biggest downside with it is that it has upper limit (I believe it is 250 rows) on how much data it can load on each table. Therefore, if a table has a lot of entries and you want to check for specific group of data, you need to query them. Which isn't too bad. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Before this, when you have an Android application which accessing some RESTful APIs and you want to see what kind of data your app got from API you have to setup a break point and debug the app in IDE to see the data, or write some code to dump the HTTP response to log and remove these code after that.

Now you don't have to do this anymore. By introduce Stetho into your application, you can connect Chrome to your device and use Chrome as a debug window to view real time network traffic data packet in it. Just like what you can see in Chrome's network debug panel when you open a website.

And the most interesting thing is that you can even interact with Android SDK by Javascript in Chrome's console. This is really unexpected to me. I never thought Javascript has the ability to do it. Is this means someday we can use Javascript to create an Android application? Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Stetho functions are only available if you use OkHttpClient . The other Android network libraries like Volley is not supported.

Also, since all the network data packets go through Stetho, maybe Stetho can also provide the ability to modify data packet as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

In short : Stetho saves time to fix issues.

a.) Stetho makes debugging easier and fast and not only for the DB operation but also for shared preferences. If you use stetho you don't have to write your internal resources such as Sqlite Db or shared preferences in sdcard.

b.) Feature which I like the most is that you can directly run queries on the db which helps again in saving time.

c.) It is quite likely for android developer to use OK HTTP in their application and with the help of Stetho you can track and keep an eye on all the network requests (if you use OK HTTP).

d.) You can edit the values of DB and shared preferences in real time.

e.) Tells you the complete hierarchy of the layouts

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a.) Sometimes you can't connect the device .

b.) Steho disconnects when you application close due to some crash and then you can't see the real time DB.

c.) Missing integration with popular libraries . One such example is apache (In our project we use java apache library for network classes and Stetho is missing integration with it.) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Best thing i like about Stetho is -

1. You can check sqlite database of running android app by adding few lines of code. This reduces the effort of saving database on sd card and then checking it when required.

2. You can run sql quiries directly from the tool to get the results.

3. You can also check network utilization and performance from the tool. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One thing that i dislike about Stetho is that to do network inspection, it only supports OkHttp and HttpURLConnection. It does not support apache networking classes to test legacy android applications which have used apache networking classes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Being able to read and edit the database and preferences without any effort. It has helped me a lot to resolve big problems.

The view hierarchy viewer is really nice. It has helped me debug legacy and complex layouts with unreliable states.

I've sometimes used the custom scripts to automate repetitive tasks or tests some things. Haven't used it much, but it's really useful when you need it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It might be buggy sometimes. Like causing temporary freezes.

It also disconnects from the process when you re-launch the application, so you need to manually close the old debugging window and open a new one. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Can display the app's SQLite DB

- Can intercept and display network requests, including OkHttp / Retrofit !

- Can inspect Android view hierarchy!

- Also works with Realm! (https://github.com/uPhyca/stetho-realm) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Can't execute SQL queries against database

- Realm plugin sometimes breaks after new Realm releases, since the database is proprietary and updates frequently. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the network debugger seeing all the requests. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- I cant see the views layout if I start it with the application context, I have a debugger menu that I add just for debug builds and from there I enable stetho, I cant use the activity context to init stetho or I can?

- I cant see the https calls (I use retrofit and okHttp interceptors). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Stetho is a great Android library that speeds up development. The site does a great job of listing all of these features, but here's the highlights:

* The ability to use Chrome DevTools to inspect your Android layout in real time. Just like DevTools on the web, views will highlight as you mouse over the view tree in your browser. It's quite magical! In addition, the view tree will have the concrete class name of your views, even if they're custom views. No more XML snapshots that simplify your custom views to their base class (like FrameLayout) - see the actual class name!

* Inspect and change your SharedPrefs and database live!

* If you use OkHttp, you'll get to use Chrome's network inspector with your app!

* Add your own custom command line commands that interact with your app. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

* The layout inspector can really slow down apps that have large, complicated layouts. You have to be careful to not open the devtools console when you're not using it in that case.

* The SQLite inspector is great, but if you have a lot of columns, the columns can get super skinny and difficult to resize, limiting its usefulness.

* Network inspection only really works easily if you're using OkHttp. Settings it up otherwise can be a real pain, and may be more trouble than it's worth. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.