Android EditText password and UI Automator

I just figured out that if you have EditText field in Android application and you try to check if the password is set correctly with UI Automator, getText() will return empty string.

Here is my password field

<EditText
    android:id="@+id/eb_et_password"
    android:layout_width="0dp"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:layout_weight="1"
    android:imeOptions="actionGo"
    android:inputType="textPassword" />

And here is the UI Automation test code

String password = mDevice.findObject(new UiSelector().resourceId(getId("eb_et_password"))).getText();

The password string above will be empty.

If you remove android:inputType="textPassword" from the EditText, the test code will work and return the password string in the EditText field.

I haven’t found a solution for this yet, if I find it I’ll update this post.