Getting adb and fastboot without going crazy

What if you need to run adb or fastboot but you’re not developing an app (yet!), so installing the behemoth that is Android Studio (or even the SDK Manager) is simply overkill?

What do you do?

Links abound on the web – especially on Android-hacking sites like xda developers – to download these tools from some random place. Not a great idea, for lots of reasons.

What if it were stupidly easy to get these basic tools, directly from Google, in one easy step?

After recently using SDK Manager to download the latest bits, I noticed a URL fly past with a download location for the platform tools. This URL was specific to Mac OSX, but by trying a couple of variations I easily figured out the Windows and Linux download URLs.

These will get you version r24 of the platform tools – the latest version, as of 2016 August. I’ll try to keep these links up-to-date. You can also try incrementing the version number to see if you get something other than a 404. ;-)

Venture forth and download:

After downloading the zip file you’ll need to unzip the contents somewhere and add the directory to your PATH.

Easy peasy!