Shell access via adb

You can put your UBports device into developer mode and access a Bash shell from your PC. This is useful for debugging or more advanced shell usage.

Install ADB

First, you’ll need ADB installed on your computer.

On Ubuntu:

sudo apt install android-tools-adb

On Fedora:

sudo dnf install android-tools

And on MacOS with Homebrew:

brew install android-platform-tools

For Windows, grab the command-line tools only package from here.

Enable developer mode

Next, you’ll need to turn on Developer Mode.

  1. Reboot your device
  2. Place your device into developer mode (Settings - About - Developer Mode - check the box to turn it on)
  3. Plug the device into a computer with adb installed
  4. Open a terminal and run adb devices.

Note

When you’re done using the shell, it’s a good idea to turn Developer Mode off again.

If there’s a device in the list here (The command doesn’t print “List of devices attached” and a blank line), you are able to use ADB successfully. If not, continue to the next section.

Adb shell commands:

adb shell getprop - Lists all system properties and their values.
adb shell setprop [property] [value] - Sets the value to a specific property.

Add hardware IDs

ADB doesn’t always know what devices on your computer it should or should not talk to. You can manually add the devices that it does not know how to talk to.

Just run the command for your selected device if it’s below. Then, run adb kill-server followed by the command you were initially trying to run.

Fairphone 2:

printf "0x2ae5 \n" >> ~/.android/adb_usb.ini

Oneplus One:

printf "0x9d17 \n" >> ~/.android/adb_usb.ini