Running adb devices, doesn’t show my connected device

When I return to debugging Android, this is the usually the first thing I run into (if abd is installed on my machine), I run “adb devices” and it shows nothing, even though my device is plugged into the USB Then I remember you need to turn on USB debugging, which means you need to […]

Setting up My Mac for working with Android

I wrote this blog post a while ago, but didn’t seem to work for me now I am on a refreshed Mac (IT replaced the HD) and also had a recent OS update, which might be why the old stuff I setup before isn’t working. I created a new Android directory to work out of […]

Backing up the Android

WIP – I think this would be straight forward since one of the “adb” subcommand options is “backup” however it doesn’t seem to be that simple (at least for me). First the command: adb backup [-f <file>] [-apk|-noapk] [-shared|-noshared] [-all] [-system|nosystem] [<packages…>] Note: If a file isn’t specified than it defaults to backup.ab However apparently […]

Turning the output from getevent into something something that can be used

My end goal was to to be able to “doodle” on the android screen, with a script. I can’t do the math to generate the image I want, so I ran the adb shell command “getevent” then using the mouse, I drew on the screen. However the output isn’t immediately usable, first there was the […]

adb shell sendevent, sending touch like events

Oh joy – output in hex but I need decimal Running my test app in the emulator, to figure out where I was “touching” on the screen, I used the command: adb shell getevent Which returns something like: C:\>adb shell getevent add device 1: /dev/input/event0 name: “qwerty2” could not get driver version for /dev/input/mouse0, Not […]

adb shell sendevent (could not open /dev/input/event0:, No such file or directory)

This is still a work in progress to get monkeyrunner to interact with a screen that people need to basically draw on. I found this command to get back coordinates of what is being touched on the screen: adb shell getevent Which returns something like this add device 1: /dev/input/event0 name: “qwerty2” could not get driver version […]

AdbChimpDevice: Error starting command

I have a simple monkeyrunner script, that runs correctly for that I need, but often hits this error: AdbChimpDevice: Error starting command, and it doesn’t always happen in the same place. From the source code I looked at, there was a comment that exception happens a lot, yet in my case the script still ran […]

Get the version from the phone using adb

Using adb you can get the version of software running on your android, if you grep for a certain string (piece of data). Windows is my test machine, yet I like grep for command line searches, so I found a version I can run on my machine and installed it and updated the path so […]

Installing new builds faster

I am repeatedly installing new builds (removing the old one first) so I created a batch file (very, very simple) to do the work for me. update_droid.bat To run it: update_droid.bat new-app.apk Contents of batch file: echo off adb uninstall com.company.app adb install %1 adb logcat -c 2nd line removes the app base on […]

logcat options

Finally back into Android testing, running into the current problem where there is too much information in the log, I need to narrow it down to just the error that I am running into. Fortunately logcat has built in help, I am just posting this as a note to myself to make life easier. For […]