AndroidManifest in androidTest directory being ignored

This is a known problem.

Currently (AGP <= 3.4.X) is not supporting AndroidManifest test merging.

This is reported here: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/127986458 and here there is the issue created by one of the Roboelectric maintainers.

The workaround as described here its near the same proposed by user3286293 and currently is the only way to have the manifest merged for testing purposes.

Hope to see a fix for AGP 3.5 or 3.6

I needed to do something similar. I created a folder named "debug" next to androidTest, which corresponds to the debug variant of the app, and put an AndroidManifest.xml with the permission in that folder. Then the permission works under test since the test app uses the debug variant. It's not ideal because it blurs the line between test and debug, which aren't quite the same thing.

I think what's happening is that the permissions in androidTest/AndroidManifest.xml are going to the test app, not the target app, although it's not 100% clear to me if there are actually two different APKs or what.

In older versions of Android Studio and the Android Gradle plugin the androidTest/AndroidManifest.xml file was ignored. This was documented at the tools.android.com site at the time.

With the Android Studio 1.0+ and Android Gradle 1.0+ plugin launch in December 2014 the AndroidManifest.xml file should now be merged with the normal main/AndroidManifest.xml files (in addition to the debug and release manifest files if they exist). More details regarding the manifest merging rules are here.

If you still run into issues or are just debugging manifest related testing issues try this (Adapt this slightly for Windows):

1. Drop to a terminal
2. change to to your project directory cd MyApplication
3. Build your project, assuming 'debug' is the build type you want to test with, but you could also be testing with 'release' or a build script defined one. ./gradlew assembleDebugTest
4. Then inspect your test APK manifest: ls app/build/intermediates/manifests/test/debug/AndroidManifest.xml
5. View your application APK manifest: ls app/build/intermediates/manifests/full/debug/AndroidManifest.xml
6. A merge output log can be found detailing the manifest merging process: ls app/build/outputs/apk/manifest-merger-debug-report.txt

A couple of extra notes:

• An instrumentation element is automatically added to your test APK's AndroidManifest.xml so you should only be adding extra activities, permissions, etc that your test APK needs.
• If testing with mock locations your application APK will need the ACCESS_MOCK_LOCATION permission. You can add the permission to your debug/AndroidManifest.xml file or you can define that the test APK and the application APK should use the same userId when deployed (sharedUserId attribute in your AndroidManifest.xml).

As specified here, during instrumented tests, there are generated two .apk files. If you take a look, the smaller one it's most probably the one named app-debug-androidTest-unaligned.apk and it actually does include the provided permissions.

Inspecting the file with aapt d permissions <apk_file_path>.apk can be useful to see a list of all of them.

Now, there might be an issue with the context itself where the permission is requested. I had a similar problem, trying to write some screenshots on SD card (thus needing the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission).

This answer helped me to fix the problem, although I cannot fully understand why it's necessary.

In few words, you'll need to declare the same android:sharedUserId in both manifests, in order to merge the permissions when both apks are installed on the same device - that happens when tests are running. This helped me to separate permissions needed just for testing from the one in production.