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by jmgao 899 days ago
I wish that the people that wrote it at the beginning of Android had left it as a socket multiplexer over USB and delegated to ssh for everything else. adb started out extremely barebones, but it grew to reimplement basically all of ssh.
3 comments
fabiensanglard 899 days ago
Haha. I read the comment and wondered "How does this guy knows so much about ad....". Oh. Its Josh!
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wkat4242 899 days ago
Well out of the box Android doesn't even come with an SSH daemon. I run one sometimes through termux but it's not standard.

And some of the functionality it offers doesn't really have an SSH equivalent, like the install command.

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sand500 899 days ago
Even funnier is during the pandemic, we got adb over ssh so our desktops in the office could still connect to devices at our house.
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wkat4242 898 days ago
Hah I did the opposite.

I set up an OpenSmartphoneTestFarm (openSTF) instance at the office so people working from home could fully control smartphones inside the office to debug wifi issues. Because some countries had lockdowns at different times, so it could be that production users could work in the office but some of our support people couldn't. This way they could still test things inside the actual office. And we didn't have to supply our support people with tons of testing phones. Only issue was that it never supported iOS but we use mainly Android anyway for corporate phones, because dual-use (work/private) is a lot better on android. Only in the US they demanded to have iPhones and we outsource the support there.

It worked pretty well actually. https://openstf.io/

But they dropped support on it and moved to another product (device farmer) which never seems to have materialised at all. I don't know what happened to it but we just kept running openstf until the end of the pandemic. It worked fine anyway. But it's too bad it seems to be completely gone as it was actually a great piece of software. A bit overly complex to set up with tons of different docker containers for each part of the service, it was clearly meant for huge distributed installs, which we didn't really need.

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