USB Debugging using Android Debug Bridge

Go wireless!

Mobile application development comes with a load of side work including setting up an emulator or turning on developer mode on your real device to test in-development applications. Keeping a real device connected with a USB cable is a headache as constant movement can disconnect it. Well, there is a wireless solution for this problem.

Android SDK comes with a package called Android Debug Bridge or ADB for short. After the Android SDK has been installed and environment variables are added, all you have to do is locate the Android Debug Bridge package inside the SDK location and concatenate it to the system’s path variable.

Before adding it to the path, running adb in the command prompt will return an error claiming that adb is not recognized as an internal or external command as shown below.

Figure 1: Before adding adb to the path variable

Since adb is present in the Android SDK folder so we first make sure we have it added in environment variables under User variables. The name given to the SDK path should be ANDROID_HOME.

Now scroll the System variables to find PATH variables and edit them.

Append to the PATH a new path for the Android Debug Bridge as shown in figure 4. Note that we used the Android SDK path’s name to avoid repetition.
adb.exe is present inside the platform-tools…