Handsets is a high-performance command-line interface (CLI) built in Rust for controlling Android devices. It is designed to be efficient for both AI agents and human users, offering a lean solution for Android automation. The tool emphasizes low-latency operations, with single call latencies reported between 2-7 milliseconds, significantly faster than alternatives like uiautomator2 or Appium.
Key features include the ability to find UI elements by label, not just coordinates, and a terminal UI (`hs tui`) that provides a live, interactive video stream of the device's elements. This terminal UI allows for keyboard-driven navigation and interaction, with a background watcher polling the accessibility tree at 10 frames per second to ensure a live state without manual refreshes or idle waits. Actions are fire-and-forget, enabling rapid key mashing without delays.
Handsets uses a length-prefixed binary protocol over `adb forward` for communication. It requires `adb` to be on the system's PATH and supports macOS and Linux. Python bindings are available via `pip install handsets`, and it can be driven from other languages by parsing JSON output from `hs json` subprocess calls. The project is open-source under the MIT License and is currently in a pre-1.0 state, with its CLI surface stable since v0.1.0. The latest release is v0.1.31.