Sunday, December 5, 2010

Installing Android Applications from PC Directly on your Phone

Alright,

Here comes another simple guide on how to install your Android Apps directly from your PC onto your phone. We all know how much of a pain it really is to install applications that you download from the internet. Many betas release their apps in the form of APKs and what the general public usually does is transfers the file to their phone and then they install it using a File Manager.

Well, now its not necessary. All this requires is a little ingenuity and ADB.

Now, what people don't realize is that Android Debug Bridge ( commonly referred to as ADB ) has this capability to install a file onto the phone directly if hooked up. There's no need to transfer the file anymore.

The ADB command usually goes like this..

adb install -r xxxx.apk

And this is perfectly great if you have opened a Command Prompt window in that particular folder where your APK is located.

Or you could be like me, and create a batch file.

In any text editor, put the following one line

adb install -r %*

And save it as ADBInstall.bat ( use whatever name you want =/ )

Now, what you have to do, is put this batch file somewhere where you're not likely to touch it. The C:\Windows folder would be a good place to start.

Next what you have to do.. is make all APK files open with that batch file by default. This is accomplished by right clicking on the apk file, and selecting "Open With".

In the resulting window, click on the "Browse" button. Now you hunt for that batch file and select it.

Voila!

Now you can install applications directly to your phone by just double clicking the APKs.

However, there is one caveat of course. Your phone has to be hooked up with USB Debugging Enabled :).

Regards.

1 comment: