And since it’s a command line utility, you’ll only need to update it for your terminal (as opposed to Mac GUI applications). Since Android Studio tends to install the Android SDK in your user directory, you’ll want to edit the PATH for your user. Now, whenever you type adb in this terminal window you can execute adb commands. So in my example above, this becomes: PATH='/Users/martinpatrick/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools:$PATH'

To temporarily add the platform-tools directory to your PATH, type: PATH='/platform-tools:$PATH' MacOS (and Linux) users will typically use zsh or bash for their shell. On Linux the steps can vary, but the MacOS instructions will work in some cases. This will be different on each operating system, and I’ll list out MacOS and Windows below. before adb.” To get the experience many Android devs enjoy, you must update your PATH environment variable. You can run adb now, but I’ve never found a tutorial that starts with “copy your SDK path, cd into platform-tools, and type. You should see adb or adb.exe depending on your operating system. Typically it’s installed via Android Studio when you install the Android SDK under platform-tools, but it takes some amount of setup for your operating system to know to look there.įirst open up Android Studio and navigate to “Tools > SDK Manager” from the menu. But this isn’t necessary! adb ships with the Android SDK installed by Android Studio, and with a couple of manual steps you can ensure that you’re always using the same up to date tools that your IDE is! What’s the deal with adb?Īdb stands for the “Android Debug Bridge,” which is a command line utility that is the debug multitool for Android. If your first instinct is to search for “how to install adb,” you’ll likely end up with some instructions about installing it in via your operating system’s package manager or downloading random zip files from phone customization websites. Or: adb : The term 'adb' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. That’s when it happens: command not found: adb Eventually you may come across a tutorial telling you to type adb, maybe to enable debug mode in Firebase. So you’ve downloaded Android Studio and installed the SDK.

Install adb tools