Twitter open-sources Screengrab, a tool to automatically take screenshots on Android

Twitter today announced it has released a tool called Screengrab that makes it easy for applications to take screenshots of Android applications. Screengrab integrated with Twitter’s Fastlane developer tools, and it’s available now on GitHub under an open-source Apache license.

“A picture is worth a thousand words. Your screenshots need to reflect the best of your app’s user experience, but taking perfect screenshots is a ton of work,” Twitter product manager Hemal Shah wrote in a blog post. “The process includes capturing the shots, making sure each one is lined up correctly, and then localizing them for your customers’ needs. With screengrab, taking and uploading screenshots to the Google Play Store has never been easier.”

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Twitter acquired Fastlane last year to enhance its developer toolkit. Fastlane picked up traction by automating parts of the iOS app development process, and last year it added beta support for Android. Twitter Fastlane already has the Snapshot screenshot tool for iOS, and now Twitter’s Fastlane division has a tool made just for Android.

Like other web companies, Twitter regularly open-sources software, which can help its tools become more popular and also allow the company to discover new talent. Other recent open-source releases include bug-spotting tool Diffy and data sets that people can use to train neural networks for artificial intelligence.

Other open-source tools that developers can use to automatically take screenshots include android-screenshot-lib and Facebook’s screenshot-tests-for-android.