Wireless ADB – adb without wires
Since I’ve been talking about Qi and living with wireless a lot lately, I thought I’d tackle one of the last reasons a root user needs a USB port – ADB. There are non-root uses for ADB as well, and as such there are links to versions that can utilize root, or not. Your preference.
For non-root people, there plenty of non-root wireless adb options. One of them is ADB Wireless (No root) by Apps By Henry. For the root crowd there’s ADB Wireless by Wave18. There are plenty of other similarly named apps available and they basically do the same thing. Find one you like.
Once you have one of these connected and running, from a computer on the same network as the device you’re attempting to manage you can connect by typing adb connect ipaddress. After you’ve connected to the device’s IP address you can do most any adb command you could via USB.
After you’re done on the computer, you can type ADB disconnect to stop adb commands from aiming at that IP address.
It should be noted that you’ll require the phone to be in Android mode and one of those apps running in order to function. You won’t be able to wirelessly adb when in recovery unless the developers of your custom recovery significantly up their game.
You’re also limited in speed to whatever your wireless is, which might be a pain when you’re pushing 1.2GB ROMs.
There’s one final drawback – that being that you’ll probably need to connect the phone via USB at least once to the computer, as you’ll need to authorize the computer’s “fingerprint” to talk to the phone on newer Android versions. That authentication prompt doesn’t pop up on wireless according to the reviews I’ve read.
And with that I think we have only one more thing left to go to solving the loss of an easily accessible USB port – that being disk drive mode. That’s another time and piece.