Facebook Inc. has become more than just a social media company over the last few years as the company started developing new technologies to solve its own unique challenges. Some of these innovations have been released into the open source community, such as the 6-Pack networking switch that was unveiled last week.

Today, Facebook has announced the release of yet another open source tool, this time for app developers. Stetho is a debugging platform for Android development that has been used internally by Facebook and is now available to everyone.

Stetho works directly through the Chrome Developer Tools interface, making it easy for users already familiar with that system to start using the new debug tools.

“At our scale, we aim to have tools that let engineers not only quickly discover problems and fix them, but also help model behavior to move efficiently through a large code base,” writes Facebook Android software engineer Josh Guilfoyle. “Lack of a solution for this need led us, like a lot of other Android developers, to a fair number of inconsistently maintained internal UIs, circumstantial and hard-to-interpret Log statements, not to mention many painful sessions with the Java debugger.

“Convenient access to data”

“Today, we’re open-sourcing a powerful new debugging platform for Android called Stetho,” writes Guilfoyle. “With it, developers can unlock much richer and more convenient access to data.”

Stetho is designed to quickly find coding errors and other problems by providing a clear snapshot of program data, including error exceptions, process run time, and more. Guilfoyle notes that the current public version of Stetho is an early release with several features missing and is “not yet” a total debug tool replacement, but more tools will be added to the platform in the near future.  He also hints that other open source projects might be coming later this year, calling Stetho “our first Android open source project in 2015.”

Guilfoyle’s post includes simple instructions for implementing the Stetho library in Chrome Developer Tools, as well as information on running Stetho scripts within other debug code. Facebook welcomes feedback from developers on the Stetho Github page.

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