In this entry of my Android Pro Tip’s series I’m going to fill you in on an easy, one line piece of code you can use to detect if you’re running in a Firebase Test Lab.

Why would you want to do this?

There are a number of reasons you might need to detect if you’re running inside a Firebase Test Lab, a few of them being:

You might want your app to react a little differently than it would when being run by a real users.

You might want to disable analytics in test lab so as not to dilute your analytical data.

You might want to disable access to certain features that cost you money such as uploading to image buckets or running certain backend requests.

You might want to add a “test” header to certain backend requests so you can differentiate real data from test lab data.

You get the idea.

So how do you do it?

fun isInTestLab(contentResolver: ContentResolver): Boolean {

return Settings.System.getString(contentResolver,

"firebase.test.lab") == "true"

}

Easy right? Firebase Test Lab returns true when querying for this system settings string, so you can now detect when you’re running inside the test lab inside your code & react accordingly. Simple.