About ADB Handbook

ADB Handbook is a reference for people who automate and test Android devices over adb: app developers, QA automation engineers, people building RPA on phone apps, and anyone who has watched a device drop to offline halfway through a run.

It's written by Xavier Fok and the team in Singapore that runs cloudf.one, a rack of real Android phones you control from the browser. We spend a lot of time on the unglamorous parts of adb: authorization keys, ports, USB, and phones that fall off the network. That's the angle here.

The rules we write by are short. A command goes up only after it's been checked against the official docs (developer.android.com, the scrcpy, Appium and uiautomator2 projects). Anything that depends on an Android or tool version names the version. If something needs root, we say so. We don't publish benchmark numbers we didn't measure, and when the docs and real devices disagree, we write down both.

Topics: adb fundamentals (install, pairing, wireless debugging, shell, logcat, dumpsys, pm and am, input, screenrecord), scrcpy, automation frameworks (uiautomator2, Appium, Espresso), emulators against real devices, root against non-root, device farms, and running a lot of phones at once.

Corrections are welcome and get fixed quickly: [email protected]. How we handle links to our own product is on the disclosure page.