Bash Scripting for Mobile App Development

Installing ADB

Before we dive into the Bash scripting part, let’s make sure ADB is installed on your development machine. ADB comes bundled with the Android SDK platform tools, so you’ll need to have the Android SDK installed first.

You can check if ADB is already installed by opening a terminal and running the following command:

adb version

Writing a Basic Bash Script

Let’s start by writing a basic Bash script that connects to an Android device using ADB and retrieves the list of installed applications on the device. Create a new file called list_apps.sh and open it in a text editor.

#!/bin/bash

# Connect to device using ADB
adb connect 

# Get list of installed applications
adb shell pm list packages

In the above script, we start by adding a shebang directive (#!/bin/bash) at the beginning of the file. This informs the system that the script should be executed using the Bash shell.

Next, we use the adb connect command to establish a connection to the Android device. Replace with the IP address of your device. Ensure that your Android device is connected to the same network as your development machine.

Executing the Bash Script

Now that we’ve written the Bash script, let’s execute it and see the results. Open a terminal, navigate to the directory where you saved the list_apps.sh file, and run the following command:

bash list_apps.sh

Passing Arguments to the Bash Script

Often, you’ll need to pass arguments to your Bash script to customize its behavior. For example, you might want to specify the device IP address as a command-line argument instead of hardcoding it in the script.

Here’s an updated version of the list_apps.sh script that accepts the device IP address as an argument:

#!/bin/bash

# Connect to device using ADB
adb connect 

# Get list of installed applications
adb shell pm list packages

In the updated script, represents the first command-line argument passed to the script. When executing the script, you can now provide the device IP address as an argument:

Iterating Over a List of Devices

When testing on multiple devices, you might want to iterate over a list of device IP addresses and perform the same set of operations on each device. This can be achieved using a Bash for loop.

Here’s an example script that connects to multiple devices using ADB and retrieves the list of installed applications on each device:

#!/bin/bash

# List of device IP addresses

devices=("192.168.1.101" "192.168.1.102" "192.168.1.103")
# Iterate over devices

for device in ${devices[@]}; do

    # Connect to device using ADB

    adb connect $device