To ensure that the monkey of a monkey test (an emulated user doing random taps) cannot do all possible actions.

https://books.google.nl/books?id=68BZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&lpg=PA... "Bruce grew the lab over the years from an initial set of seven devices to more

than 400. He said there were some unanticipated problems to resolve over that time. "One day I walked into the monkey lab to hear a voice say, '911-What's your emergency?" That situation resulted in Dianne adding a new function to the API, isUserAMonkey(), which is used to gate actions that monkeys shouldn't take during tests (including dialing the phone and resetting the device)."

"image not available"

that's because you're not a monkey

Interestingly, the original Mac had a similar MonkeyLives flag: https://folklore.org/Monkey_Lives.html

I assume that's the "The Monkey" testing tool for the original Mac that's mentioned in the footnotes in the Androids book. Supposedly goes back to the infinite monkey theorem that makes monkeys act as a metaphor for randomness, and it was also mentioned that one of the developers of Android had used the same kind of monkey testing for WebTV and Palm OS.