CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidadb
Cole
Cole

Reputation: 2815

What is the ADB?

I keep reading tutorials where I'm supposed to enter something into the ADB command line and that it's in my Android sdk/platform-tools. So I find it, click on it, and a black screen comes up for about 2 seconds and while it's up, it scrolls through a bunch of text. So how am I supposed to use this "adb"?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 810

Answers (2)

Necronet
Necronet

Reputation: 6813

Pretty sure that is well documented since day 1 on the Android Debug Bridge

Android Debug Bridge (adb) is a versatile command line tool that lets you communicate with an emulator instance or connected Android-powered device. It is a client-server program that includes three components:

A client, which runs on your development machine. You can invoke a client from a shell by issuing an adb command. Other Android tools such as the ADT plugin and DDMS also create adb clients. A server, which runs as a background process on your development machine. The server manages communication between the client and the adb daemon running on an emulator or device. A daemon, which runs as a background process on each emulator or device instance.

So plain old English, ADB can be found on %ANDROID_HOME%/platform-toos/, and it's this magical command line that allows you to comunicate with your mobile device, either a physical or a Virtual device (AVD), so whenever you deploy you are passing the application through the device thanks to the ADB on a specific client port on your computer to the daemon port on the device.

Interesting things you can do with it?

  • Logcat: ./adb logcat allows you to see the log trace of each proces.
  • Install: ./adb install allows you to install apk to the device.
  • Killing:./adb kill-sever
  • Starting:./adb stat-server
  • Enter SQLite3: adb -s your_device shell
  • Use the monkey: adb shell monkey -v -p your.app.package 500 to generate random events

And a lot more! Read the documentation it's beatiful and self-explanatory.

Upvotes: 2

skynet
skynet

Reputation: 9908

It is called the Android Debug Bridge, and the Android Developers Site documentation does a better job of explaining it than I can:

http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/adb.html

If you are looking for the adb command line, navigate to <sdk>/platform-tools/ and run 

adb.exe shell

from the command line.

Upvotes: 5

Related Questions