this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
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I mostly use apps installed from F-Droid, so I’m not sure how I’ll use the phone, except that it’s sometimes required as a contact method.

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[–] Kraiden@piefed.social 26 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Depends on your comfort with CLI tools. Here's the process (assumes Windows):

  1. Download and extract platform tools
  2. Add that location to your PATH
  • Win + R, type "cmd", enter
  • set PATH=%PATH%;C:\your\path\here\ <- Temporary, just for the current session
  • setx /M path "%path%;C:\your\path\here\" <- Permanent
  1. On your device, go to Settings -> About and look for Build Number it can sometimes be buried in Software Information

  2. Tap Build Number repeatedly until a message appears You are now a developer

  3. You should now have a new Developer options menu item somewhere in your settings. Sometimes it's top level, sometimes it's buried under Additional Settings or Advanced Settings or the like

  4. Make sure USB Debugging is turned on

  5. Connect the device over USB

  6. Back on WIndows type:

  • adb devices
  • You might get a popup on the device asking if you want to allow USB debugging. Select Yes, and run adb devices again. You should see your device listed
  1. Download the APK of the app you want to install (AAB files are a PITA, but can be installed too. Try to get APK files though)
  2. Install with:
  • adb install C:/path/to/app.apk <- if adb devices only returns one device
  • adb -s <device_id> install C:/path/to/app.apk <- specific device

You can install updates the same way, just download the updated APK and add the -r flag adb install -r C:/path/to/app.apk

More useful adb commands

[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 22 points 4 days ago (3 children)
[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Most of that stuff is automatable - except the bit about activating Developer mode and USB Debugging on the device (steps 3 to 6) which only needs to be done once per device - so I expect we will soon see several nice GUI tools that automate the rest and eventually we might even just see stuff that talks directly to the phone over USB via libusb and using the same protocol as ADB, so installing the Android Platform Tools won't at all be needed.

But yeah, at this point it requires people to at the very least be familiar with using the command line.

[–] Prathas@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Someone suggested elsewhere (I can't remember where) that Shizuku could be messed around with to allow installation without any computer's involvement at all, to emulate adb on the phone itself. Would you know anything about this workaround?

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

A quick look through its documentation shows that it instructs the user how to go through a subset of the instructions the original user provided (or an alternative set of instructions if using Android 11+ as there it can use a different mechanism) plus a few more, in order to run a Shizuku service as user "adb".

From then on, that Shizuku service can then be used by other apps to do everything the "adb" user can, including installing and updating applications.

So I guess it could be used by something like F-Droid to go around Google's new mechanism to close down app installs.

For Android < 11 it's is no more non-expert friendly than the instructions already provided by the original user, though it's better in Android 11+ as there it's all interacting with menus on the Android side (see here under Start Shizuku)

[–] Kraiden@piefed.social 6 points 4 days ago

That's why I posted it. So people can decide for themselves. Doesn't seem that bad to me, but then I'm a dev, so it's really hard to judge what a non dev would be comfortable with

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

yes actually, it's just not that practical.

which i think might be the entire point anyway.