Setting up adb for user access

Question

I recently purchased an Android phone (my first). This is probably not relevant to the question, but it is a Micromax Canvas Hue AQ5000, running Android 4.4.2.

I want to access the phone from my computer, currently running Debian wheezy. ADB was recommended to me. I installed android-tools-adb, and after enabling Developer Options and USB Debugging, I was able to access the phone via adb shell, for example.

However, ADB does not work as user. Here is the corresponding udev file, /lib/udev/rules.d/70-android-tools-adb.rules.

# Set ACLs for console users on adb USB devices
# d001 recovery
# d002 system

ACTION=="add|change", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", \
  ATTRS{idVendor}=="18d1", ATTRS{idProduct}=="d001|d002", \
  TAG+="uaccess"

How should I modify this file in order to give user access? The natural way seems to be to give access to a group. Along those lines, here is one suggestion,namely an answer to "Android Debug Bridge (adb) device - no permissions" which suggests

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0666", GROUP="plugdev"

So, should I add GROUP="plugdev" to that file above, or is there a better way? Also what does the ATTRS{idVendor}=="18d1" part mean, and would that work for any device? Also, what does ATTRS{idProduct}=="d001|d002" mean?

I'll consider forwarding good suggestions to the Debian Bug Tracker.

Answer 1

On my gentoo system, the following udev rules are setup (in /lib64/udev/rules.d for me):

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="22b8", MODE="0664", GROUP="android"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0664", GROUP="android"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="04e8", MODE="0664", GROUP="android"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="18d1", MODE="0664", GROUP="android"

These rules give access to USB android devices (22b8 = Motorola, 0bb4 = HTC, 04e8 = Samsung and 18d1 = Google) to anyone in the android group.

The name of the group you decide to use is unimportant as long as your user is a member of that group.

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To address your other questions on the USB identifers, the vendor and product ids identify specific devices. You can see your identifiers using dmesg or lsusb. E.g. when I plug in my phone, dmesg reports:

[ 4573.116303] usb 4-5: New USB device found, idVendor=22b8, idProduct=2e63

and lsusb reports:

Bus 004 Device 005: ID 22b8:2e63 Motorola PCS

which tell me that my phone has a vendor id of 22b8 and product id 2e63. The udev rule:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="22b8", MODE="0664", GROUP="android"

will match this device (and all motorola phones since it is not constrained by a product id) and set permissions on the USB device for this phone to:

crw-rw-r--+ 1 root android 189, 388 May  5 19:38 /dev/bus/usb/004/005

You can find your usb device to check its permissions using the usb bus and device number. lsusb reported Bus 004 Device 005 and the device path contains .../004/005. As long as you can read/write to this device you will be able to use adb and other programs that require access to the phone.

Caveat: device naming could be slightly different on your system. I'm running udev 215 and linux kernel 4.0.1.