Android

AVD
1. Create from CLI
Get APK from Phone/Emulator
Tools
Installing / Updating Magisk
Proxy/TCP forward
Create AVD from command line

AVD

For all purposes, $ANDROID_SDK is the path to where the Android SDK is installed.

Create from CLI

First determine what system image you want to use with your AVD. In order to see a list of the available images run:

$ANDROID_SDK/tools/bin/sdkmanager --list

Check the one you want, and install it. For the example below I selected the image system-images;android-28;google_apis_playstore;x86_64.

$ANDROID_SDK/tools/bin/sdkmanager "system-images;android-28;google_apis_playstore;x86_64"

Create an AVD. This one will use the pixel_xl as the base device for it:

$ANDROID_SDK/tools/bin/avdmanager -v \
  create avd \
  -c 2048M \
  -p /path/to/store/avd/PixelXL-Android28-x86_64 \
  -n "PixelXL-Android28-x86_64" \
  -d pixel_xl \
  -k 'system-images;android-28;google_apis_playstore;x86_64'

Now edit the /path/to/store/avd/PixelXL-Android28-x86_64/config.ini file and add the following line to it to enable using your computer’s keyboard:

hw.keyboard=yes

Get APK from Phone/Emulator

First find out the name of the package you are looking for:

adb shell pm list packages

Then get the full path to where the APK is:

adb shell pm path <package_name>

For example, suppose you want to get the Microsoft Teams package, the package name is com.microsoft.teams.

adb shell pm path com.microsoft.teams

Which returns

package:/data/app/com.microsoft.teams-lghbfp74glgysnc5xyqq2g==/base.apk

Now just download the package:

adb pull /data/app/com.microsoft.teams-lghbfp74glgysnc5xyqq2g==/base.apk /tmp/teams.apk

Tools

dex2jar - https://github.com/pxb1988/dex2jar procyon - https://bitbucket.org/mstrobel/procyon jadx - https://github.com/skylot/jadx

Installing / Updating Magisk

Unlock your phone’s booloader
- For the Pixel 3a this is:
  - Go to Settings -> About phone and tap the “Build Number” 10 times
  - Go back and go into System -> Advanced -> Developer options
  - Enable USB Debugging
  - Enable “OEM Unlocking”
  - Connect your phone to your PC
  - Run adb reboot bootloader
  - Wait for the phone to reboot into the bootloader
  - On the PC run fastboot flashing unlock
  - Confirm on the phone that you want to unlock the bootloader
Check what version of Android your phone is running
Go to https://developers.google.com/android/images and download the image for your version
Decompress the file and inside of it there will be another zip file
Decompress this other zip file and get the boot.img file from it
Put the boot.img file somewhere on your phone
Download Magisk Manager and install it on your phone
Open it and click the button to install Magisk
When asked, tell it to patch a boot image
Give it the path to the boot.img file you uploaded to the phone
Download the patched image from the phone to your pc (it will be displayed on the screen after MagiskManager finishes patching it)
Disable “Automatic System Updates” on the phone by going to “Settings -> Developer Options”
Disable “Automatic System Updates” on the phone by going to “Settings -> Developer Options”
Disable “Automatic System Updates” on the phone by going to “Settings -> Developer Options”
Reboot into fastboot mode (adb reboot bootloader)
Find out what boot partition to use: fastboot getvar current-slot
Flash the appropriate boot partition with the patched image: fastboot flash boot_X magisk_patched.img where X is the result from the previous step
Run fastboot reboot
Enjoy your phone running Magisk

Proxy/TCP forward

Enable global proxy:

adb shell settings put global http_proxy 192.168.0.2:8083
adb shell settings put global https_proxy 192.168.0.2:8083

Disable global proxy

adb shell settings delete global http_proxy
adb shell settings delete global global_http_proxy_host
adb shell settings delete global global_http_proxy_port
adb shell settings delete global https_proxy
adb shell settings delete global global_https_proxy_host
adb shell settings delete global global_https_proxy_port

Create AVD from command line

From the AndroidSdk folder, run the following command:

./tools/bin/avdmanager \
  -v create avd \
  -c 2048M \
  -p ~/avds/with-google-apis/PixelXL-Android27-x86 \
  -n 'PixelXL-Android27-x86' \
  -d pixel_xl \
  -k 'system-images;android-27;google_apis_playstore;x86'

Internals