Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

Summary

Jokes and Humour in the public Android API Previously I have covered a relatively obscure now-removed placeholder string in Android that doubles as an easter egg, the fictitious carrier by the name of El Telco Loco. But this time it is about methods and other parts of the publicly facing Android API that may generally be more humourous than they are useful. Easter eggs, jokes, whatever you want to call them, that are visible to Android app developers rather than regular users. ActivityManager.isUserAMonkey() (reference) While it may initially look like a joke when it’s described as returning true if the UI is “currently being messed with by a monkey” without any further elaboration in the documentation, this is probably the one in the list with the most usefulness attached to it. It is referring to the UI Exerciser Monkey, which is a developer tool for Android that simulates random sequences of user input in order to stress-test apps. So this method will return a boolean of whether the Monkey is currently running or not. The introduction of such a method to detect the usage of the Monkey appears to have an origin in something that happened during Android’s development, as per a quote from the book Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System: One day I walked into the monkey lab to hear a voice say, ‘911 -What’s your emergency?” That situation resulted in Dianne adding a new function to the API, isUserAMonkey() which is used to gate actions that monkeys shouldn’t take during tests (including dialing the phone and resetting the device). Indeed, when feeding random and inherently unpredictable input into an app, you would want to have some way of locking away portions of an app that may have unintended real-world consequences such as calling emergency services. As such, isUserAMonkey was implemented and later made its way into the public API in Android 2.2 Froyo (API 8). UserManager.isUserAGoat() (reference) This one is more of a joke. The developer docu...