Question

I was using earlier adb to debug Android applications over wifi, usb – it was great.

Right now I am wondering if it is possible to connect phone with adb via bluetooth.
I did a quick research but didn’t find anything – have you tried it already ?

Answer 1

It is not supported by the current adb software, however you could probably make it possible if you have a rooted device (or possibly even if not – see below) either by modifying adb or by using bluetooth to tunnel a channel it does support, such as tcp.

You would need to obtain the source for the adb program – the same source is used to build both the PC and the device versions. First step is to just build it with unmodified functionality, which may take a fair amount of build system modification unless you do so as a part of a complete android source build (the way it was intended to be done)

Then you would modify it to add a bluetooth channel as an option and install it on the device (why you need root) and in your path on the PC. You’d think you could run it from an alternate location on the PC, and you likely can as long as you use it from the command line, but if your fire up DDMS it may kill off the running adb server and launch a new one using the default in the path, so ultimately you’ll have to put your modified version there.

IF you can already get your device to accept adb connections over tcp (possible with root, perhaps possible in some cases without) there is another option, which is to not modify ADB (or at least not modify the device side) and instead come up with something running on the device which accepts bluetooth connections and forwards the traffic via local loopback to the tcp port on which the stock adb is operating. This would save the trouble of having to rebuild adb.

If you have some kind of tethering or similar network-over-bluetooth solution, you might even be able to leverage that to carry adb-over-tcp-over-bluetooth without writing any code.

Finally note that it is not 100% essential that the adb daemon run as a more privileged userid or be installed in place of the official one – you can run an adb daemon as an ordinary application and do many of the expected things with it. However, whichever adb daemon is running first will grab the unix domain java debug socket, and so only that adb daemon will be able to provide the full java debug services. More primitive things like logcat, shell, running process list, push/pull, etc will at least partially work without this, provided that your adb daemon doesn’t quit (modification may be required) when it is unable to claim the debug socket. If you can kill the official adb daemon and exploit a race condition, you may be able to get an unofficial one started before it restarts – you would probably need to have a script or program to do this and run it with setsid from the official adb shell, meaning you’d need to connect via USB first. At that point, you’d also be able to start your unofficial adb daemon running as the same userid as the official one.

You may want to spend some time estimating or testing if the performance (speed) will be satisfactory before investing in a lot of time setting this up for real.