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I had a blast trying to automate a mobile app’s “Spin” feature with an emulator for the first time, and here’s how it went.
What is going?
So, I recently dove into a mobile app that dropped a cool new feature called "Spin." It’s a neat little thing where you can use your existing cards to try your luck at snagging a new or upgraded card. As my first time messing with emulators, I was stoked to automate this and save time. Here’s my journey!
Here’s the deal. If you’ve got a ton of cards and, say, a bunch of accounts, you can multiply your spins big time. But each spin involves logging in, triggering the spin, and logging out. Then you repeat that for every single account. Doing this manually is a total time suck. I mean, who’s got hours to spend clicking through the same steps over and over? It’s the kind of repetitive task that screams for a smarter solution.
Automating this was tricky. The script needed to log in with email verification codes, navigate to the right app section, identify spin-eligible cards, record results, and loop through accounts. Making all these steps work together smoothly was a real challenge.
My Solution
To automate the process, I used Python with an Android Emulator to handle navigation, email verification, result screenshots, and server delays. Here’s how I did it.
1. Navigation
This is the backbone of the whole solution. Without it, nothing else works. I used an Android Emulator as my environment, which let me control the device with Python scripts through the Android Debug Bridge (ADB). ADB is like a translator—it turns my Python commands into actions the emulator can understand, like tapping buttons or swiping screens. Setting this up took some trial and error to map out the app’s layout and figure out the right coordinates for clicks. I also had to make sure the script could handle different screen sizes and resolutions, since emulators can vary. Once I got the hang of it, navigating the app felt like magic!
2. Email Verification
Logging in required an email verification code, so I had to figure out how to grab it automatically. There were a few options, like using IMAP/SMTP to read emails or tapping into a mailbox API. But since I was already taking screenshots for results, I went with a simpler approach: screen-capturing the email app and using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract the code. I opened the email app in the emulator, snapped a screenshot, and ran it through an OCR tool to pull out the verification code. It’s not fancy, but it got the job done reliably.
3. Results Screenshot
Capturing the spin results was pretty straightforward once I figured out navigation. It’s just another action, like clicking a button. I used ADB to take screenshots after each spin and saved them to a folder on my computer. Since I was already using OCR for email verification, I also extracted text from the result screenshots to store them in both image and text formats. This made it super easy to review tons of results later without squinting at images. The only thing to watch out for was organizing the screenshots so I didn’t end up with a messy pile of files.
4. Handling Fluctuating Server Responses
This part was tricky. Servers don’t always respond instantly, and the app had animations or loading screens that threw off the script’s timing. Since the emulator is “replacing” me to interact with the server, I couldn’t just fire off commands and hope for the best. Adding a few seconds of time.sleep() between actions helped a lot. It gave the app time to catch up, like waiting for a button to appear or an animation to finish. Tuning these delays took some tweaking, but it made the script way more stable.
What’s next?
This is just the first version of my automation script, and I can already feel there’s room to polish it up. But for now, it does exactly what it’s supposed to—spins those cards like a champ! Honestly, piecing this together with LLM (yeah vibe coding), was great, and it was such a sweet moment when it all clicked. I’m pumped to keep tinkering until I snag my dream card!
