ADB (Android Debug Bridge) is a tool that comes with the Android SDK that allows you to control and interface with your Android device.
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.
adb can communicate with an Android device through USB (USB debugging must be enabled). When already established, this connection can be transferred to a wireless network using adb tcpip command.
With adb commands operations like restarting the Android device, installing an application on the device or deleting an application from the device, if you have root privileges accessing the file system of the device etc. are possible.
adb is included with Android SDK, or more specifically its platform-tools package, which can be downloaded and installed separately from the SDK:
Also users of 32-bit systems need to use version r23.0.1 - the later versions include 64-bit binaries:
Be aware that while adb shares a lot of code across all supported platforms - some of its code is platform specific. Please provide more details about your environment when asking for help with adb trouble shooting.
