Android Studio takes about thirty seconds to launch on my machine and another twenty to index a project. That’s fine when I’m going to write code for an hour. It is absurd when the job is adb pull on one file, or checking which branch a tester’s build came from, or tailing logcat while someone reproduces a bug on a call.
The terminal is the obvious answer, and it’s what I used for years. But some of those jobs are visual: a logcat stream is easier to read filtered and coloured than scrolling by; a screenshot diff is a picture, not a number; a file browser is a tree. ADB Remote is the native macOS window that wraps the commands I run dozens of times a day and adds the visual tools that are genuinely faster than flags.
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
What it wraps
Everything ADB Remote does, you can do with adb and ./gradlew. That’s the point — it’s a front end for tools you already have, not a replacement for them:
- Device manager — everything
adb devicessees, USB or Wi-Fi debugging, emulators included. - Logcat — live stream with level, tag and text filters. The feature I open most.
- Gradle — the project’s task list;
assembleDebug,installDebug, your custom tasks, with output streaming. - File explorer — browse the device filesystem and pull files without typing paths from memory.
- Screenshot testing — capture a baseline, compare later captures, see the differences highlighted.
- Git — list branches and tags, check one out, build and run it on a device to test a PR without touching the IDE’s working tree.
- Activity tracker — the current foreground activity, for debugging navigation.
- ADB toolbox — clear data, uninstall, grant and revoke permissions, input text, screenshots.
- An embedded terminal, and “open in” for iTerm2, Terminal.app, Warp and your editor.
Why Compose Multiplatform for desktop
I write Kotlin all day for Android, and Compose Multiplatform lets me write a macOS app in the same language and UI toolkit without learning AppKit for a tool only developers will run. The trade-off is a JVM runtime in the bundle — ADB Remote ships a Java 17 runtime in the DMG so there’s nothing to install — and a look that is “clean cross-platform” rather than “native Mac”. For a developer utility that’s acceptable; for a consumer app it wouldn’t be, which is why everything else I ship on Apple platforms is Swift.
Signed and notarized, because otherwise it doesn’t open
An unsigned Mac app downloaded from the internet is a Gatekeeper dialog followed by a support email. ADB Remote is signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarized, so it opens like anything from the App Store. It’s distributed through Gumroad rather than the Mac App Store because a tool that shells out to adb and reads your project directory doesn’t fit inside the sandbox.
Free for one device
The free tier is one connected device and a subset of the tools. Pro unlocks unlimited devices and everything. There’s no account and no telemetry; the app talks to your local ADB and nothing else.
ADB Remote is available for macOS. If you spend your day in Android Studio, it’s the window you keep open next to it.