Android Debug Bridge (ADB)

ADB is a command-line tool that lets you communicate with an Android device. It includes three components: Client, Daemon (adbd) and Server. The client is the adb.exe file in the platform tools folder. The daemon runs the command on a device and it's a background process on the device. The server manages communication between the client and the daemon and runs as a background process on your development machine.

When you start an adb client, it first checks whether there is an adb server already running. If there isn't it starts the server on your machine.

To communicate to your device using adb first you need to enable USB debugging in your device by tapping 7 times on the Build number in your device setting enabling USB debugging in Developer options.

List of connected devices

adb devices

It'll list the attached devices, with their serial number.

Install an app

adb install path_to_apk

You must use the -t option when you install a test APK.

Copy files to/from a device

adb pull remote_path local_path
adb push local_path remote_path
adb push foo.txt /sdcard/foo.txt

Stop the adb server

In some cases, you might need to terminate the adb server to resolve an issue if it doesn't respond to a command. To stop the adb server, run the following command and then when you issue a new command it'll start a new server.

adb kill-server

Issue shell commands

You can issue a shell command which will be run on the device. Android provides most of the usual Unix command-line tools. For a list of available tools, use the following command:

adb shell ls /system/bin

Which lists all the binaries in the device which you can run using the shell command.

Activity manager

Within an adb shell, you can perform various system actions, such as start and activity, force-stop a process, etc.

adb shell am start -a android.intent.action.VIEW

Package manager

To perform actions and queries on app packages installed on the device, use this command. For example:

adb shell pm uninstall com.example.MyApp

For granting or revoking permission we use this command. For example:

adb shell pm grant com.example.MyApp android.permission.READ_PROFILE
adb shell pm revoke com.example.MyApp android.permission.READ_PROFILE

Take screenshot

To take a screenshot and pull it from the device, use the following commands:

adb shell screencap /sdcard/screen.png
adb pull /sdcard/screen.png

Record a video

To record the display of the device, use the following command:

adb shell screenrecord /sdcard/demo.mp4

Stop the screen recording by pressing Control + C; otherwise, the recording stops automatically at three minutes or the time limit set by --time-limit.

sqlite

To examine the sqlite databases, use this command:

adb -s emulator-5554 shell
sqlite3 /data/data/com.example.app/databases/rssitems.db

You can use .dump to print the content of a table and .schema to print the SQL CREATE statement for an existing table.