Description

Adevice is a command-line tool that enables Android Platform developers to update their device with their locally built artifacts. The tool provides two major functions:

• Synchronizing files from the build output to the device. This includes pushing files to the device, cleaning stale on-device files, and providing guidance about conditions that could lead to a non-functional device.
• Running post-sync actions to put the device in a consistent working state. These actions are based on the files that have changed and range from doing nothing to rebooting the device.

Conceptually adevice tries to align the filesystem structure of the updated device to be similar to what a flash would have produced.

Adevice is similar to adb sync in that it updates the device with files from the build staging directory but has several other differences:

• Adevice has the notion of an Update Set that limits what is pushed. This concept also enables a host of other features such as determining stale files and cleaning them.
• Adevice tracks content rather than timestamps to determine changed files. This limits the number of files that get pushed to the device.

Note that adevice does not:

• Install APKs or APEX's to the device. This ensures that the device looks as close to what flashing would have produced. It uses adb push, not adb install.

Prerequisites

Adevice is intended for incremental updates and when there aren't many differences between the local build and the device. It is recommended to build and flash after syncing source before the first run.

Usage

adevice help for more options.

Updating the device

adevice update

Displaying the build and device status

adevice status

Adding a module to the update set

To push modules to the device that are not normally part of the image, you can add them to the update set with:

adevice track SomeModule

Removing a module from the update set

To remove modules that you added to the update set:

adevice untrack SomeModule

Cleaning stale files from the device

adevice clean

You can specify which connected device to use with the environment variable ANDROID_SERIAL or with the -s flag.