ADB Commands — Part III

I’m back again with the final post of ADB Commands. In this final post, I will show ‘extra’ commands, that can be like a ‘Swiss army knife’ and save you hours of despair (at least I hope so 😃).

All the previous commands presented are very useful but the dumpsys is probably at the 🔝.

dumpsys allows you to get diagnostic output for all system services running on a connected device. Most of the time the output is more verbose than you may want, so you should use the command line options of dumpsys to get output for only the system services you’re interested in. Let’s see some ‘magic’ 🎩 :

• Ever wonder if a certain alarm has been correctly scheduled ? Well, to list all the alarms that have been scheduled just type this command:

adb shell dumpsys alarm

e.g. output example of the alarms dumpsys

• Want to check all the info about a certain application ? Version name/code, first install time, last update time, requested permissions, etc. The command for all of these? Here you go:

adb shell dumpsys package com.android.chrome

e.g. output example of the package dumpsys

Another powerful option from dumpsys is the activity, where you can access all the related information about Activity Manager, activities, providers, services, broadcasts, recent activities and many other informations.

Imagine that you would like know some more information about the current ‘visible’ screen of an application. E.g.: Does it use any Fragments ? What kind of views is it using (View Hierarchy)?

adb shell dumpsys activity top

e.g. output example of the activitytop dumpsys

Want to know all the stack, recents tasks , active services or pending intents ?

adb shell dumpsys activity

e.g. ouput example of the activity dumpsys

The command above will give you an extended output with tons of useful information. To check all the available options regarding the dumpsys activity, enter the command:

adb shell dumpsys activity -h

During the developing process, it can occur that your laptop and phone are on different networks and if you have a API server running locally in your laptop, your phone will be unable to the see the API. An easy way to solve this is using the reverse command of adb. Just type:

adb reverse tcp:8000 tcp:3000

Now when your phone tries to access http://localhost:8000/ the request will be routed to localhost:3000 of your laptop.

Ever wanted to know how much battery your application is consuming?

You can achieve this through the Batterystats. The device is always collecting batterystats and other debugging information in the background so you need to erase the old battery collection data. To do this just type:

adb shell dumpsys batterystats --reset

After that start interacting with your application performing the main tasks and if you can let your application run in the background for some time to get more reliable data. When you feel you have collected enough data just pull the battery stats data. Type the following command;

In devices with ≥ Android 7.0:

adb bugreport > bugreport.zip

In devices with ≤ Android 6.0

adb bugreport > bugreport.txt

After pulling the battery data you can go to Battery Historian , upload the zip|txt file and then you can visualize system and application level events on a timeline with panning and zooming functionality; see various aggregated statistics since the device was last fully charged; select an application and inspect the metrics that impact battery specific to the chosen application.

e.g. of a Battery Historian chart

This post finishes the ADB Commands post series. And remember don’t be afraid to explore ADB command line 😎 💻