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fix(android): capture the screen the way it is actually oriented - #693

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fix(android): capture the screen the way it is actually oriented#693
filip131311 wants to merge 1 commit into
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filip/rotation-aware-capture

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@filip131311 filip131311 commented Aug 1, 2026

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Part of #609.

What was wrong

On a rotated Android device screenshot returned a portrait-framed image with the content lying sideways. describe frames and gesture coordinates were already upright — uiautomator measures against the rotated display — so the capture was the one surface out of step. An agent reading that image saw geometry that disagreed with every coordinate it was given.

Measured on a landscape Pixel_9 (API 36, mCurrentOrientation=1):

space
describe upright — "Search Settings" centre (0.530, 0.234)
taps upright — tapping describe's "Display & touch" centre opens it
screenshot (default) portrait-native, sideways

The fix

simulator-server already applies rotation correctly; nothing was telling it which one. The rotation is now queried from the device per capture, so screenshot, screenshot-diff's live captures and the auto-attached "Screen after action" screenshot all land in describe/tap space.

Nothing is tracked. A cached orientation could only be staler than the ~40 ms probe, and serving a stale one is exactly the failure being fixed. When the rotation cannot be read the request is left byte-identical to before rather than guessing — a wrong orientation is a confidently wrong image, which is worse than a sideways one.

iOS is deliberately untouched. There the whole surface is consistently portrait-native, so rotating only the capture would break an agreement rather than restore one. The iOS half of #609 needs a different change and is not in this PR.

Also fixed: the legacy uiautomator describe path

Same root cause, worse symptom. wm size reports the unrotated size — on the landscape Pixel_9 it still answered Physical size: 1080x2424. Dividing rotated bounds by that does not merely squash frames: isVisibleRect prunes nodes whose left edge is past the screen width, so the right-hand half of a landscape screen vanished from the tree. The dump carries <hierarchy rotation="N">, so the divisor is oriented from bytes already in hand — no extra round-trip on the path that runs precisely when the helper could not be reached.

On the rotation-name table

Pinned by measurement, never by what the names mean — the reporter of #609 found the same names are 180° inverted on iOS. adb exec-out screencap is rotation-aware, so it is ground truth; each candidate was scored as mean absolute difference against it both as-is and rotated 180°, so an inverted mapping could not pass:

rotation 1  LandscapeLeft       2.19  (vs 6.54 for its 180° twin)
rotation 3  LandscapeRight      2.19  (vs 6.34)
rotation 2  PortraitUpsideDown  2.67  (vs 13.13)
rotation 0  Portrait            identity

This table is the inverse of simulator-server's own 90° → LandscapeRight convention, because it compensates for a rotation that layer applies while decoding the scrcpy stream. That makes it a property of a particular simulator-server build rather than of Android — which is why a table test alone is not enough, and the delivered PNG's aspect is checked against the rotation requested, falling back to an unrotated capture if they disagree.

Verified live

Branch tool-server against a real emulator:

  • landscape, default capture → 2424×1080 upright, MAD 2.19 vs ground truth (6.54 vs its 180° twin)
  • cropping describe's frame for the toolbar out of that default capture shows exactly the "Display & touch" toolbar — the two spaces agree
  • rotation 0 → 1080×2424, MAD 2.82, unchanged
  • rotated iPad → still 2064×2752 sideways, i.e. iOS provably untouched

Plus 27 new unit tests, including one that asserts the legacy path drops the right-hand node before the fix and keeps it after. Full suite 3125 passing; lint, prettier, typecheck:tests and the tool-description gate all clean.

Not in scope

  • The iOS half of Rotated (landscape) iOS simulators: screenshots come out sideways and tap coordinates use the portrait-native frame space #609.
  • rotate on Android silently no-ops when auto-rotate is enabled (it returned {orientation:"LandscapeLeft"} while dumpsys still read cur=1080x2424). Filing separately.
  • screen-recording still records sideways — same root cause, different pipeline. Worth noting a session's screenshots are now upright while its video is not.
  • Existing visual baselines captured on a rotated Android device will stop matching, since the baseline key embeds capture dimensions and those now swap. This fails loudly as a missing baseline rather than silently comparing the wrong thing — and those baselines were sideways captures of an upright UI.

#673 and #658 are both stacked on this branch — each conflicts with this one (screenshot/index.ts and screenshot-diff/index.ts respectively) but not with each other, so both were rebased onto this branch as siblings rather than chained. Merge this first; GitHub then retargets both to main.

On a rotated Android device `screenshot` came back portrait-framed with the
content lying sideways, while `describe` frames and gesture coordinates were
already upright — uiautomator measures against the rotated display. So the
capture was the one surface out of step, and an agent reading it saw an image
whose geometry disagreed with every coordinate it was given.

simulator-server already knows how to return an upright frame; it just has to
be told which rotation to apply. The rotation is now queried from the device per
capture, so `screenshot`, `screenshot-diff`'s live captures and the auto-attached
screenshot all land in the same space as `describe`.

Nothing is tracked. A cached orientation could only ever be staler than the
~40 ms probe, and serving a stale one is precisely the failure being fixed. When
the rotation cannot be read the request is left exactly as it was rather than
guessing: a wrong orientation yields a confidently wrong image, which is worse
than a sideways one.

iOS is deliberately untouched. There the whole surface — describe frames,
gesture input and the capture — is consistently in the portrait-native space, so
rotating only the capture would break that agreement rather than restore it.

Also fixes the legacy uiautomator describe path, which was wrong on a rotated
device for a related reason: `wm size` reports the UNROTATED size (measured on a
landscape Pixel_9 still answering "Physical size: 1080x2424"), and dividing
rotated bounds by it does not merely squash frames — nodes past the too-small
width are pruned as off-screen, so the right-hand half of a landscape screen
disappeared from the tree. The dump states its own rotation, so the divisor is
oriented from bytes already in hand, with no extra round-trip on the path that
runs precisely when the helper could not be reached.

The rotation-name table is pinned by measurement against `adb exec-out
screencap`, which is rotation-aware, scoring each candidate both as-is and
rotated 180 degrees so an inverted mapping could not pass. It is the inverse of
simulator-server's own convention because it compensates for a rotation applied
during decode — which is why a table test alone is not enough, and the delivered
image's aspect is checked against the rotation requested.

Refs #609
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