How To Install ADB and Fastboot on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ADB and Fastboot on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, ADB or Android Debug Bridge is a command-line utility that lets us control an Android device from the computer itself. It’s part of Google Android SDK and can be used to run shell commands or copy files to & from the device and also to install or remove applications from the device. Fastboot is basically a diagnostics mode that is used to modify the Android file system from the computer when the Android device is in bootloader mode. It’s an alternative to recovery mode and is normally used to perform updates or to perform installations.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of ADB and Fastboot on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• An active internet connection.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install ADB and Fastboot on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing ADB and Fastboot on Ubuntu 20.04.

By default, ADB and Fastboot are available on Ubuntu 22.04 base repository. Now we run the following command to install ADB Fastboot binaries on the Ubuntu system:

sudo apt install android-tools-adb
sudo apt install android-tools-fastboot

Once the installation has been finished you can check the ADB version by running the following command:

$ adb version
Android Debug Bridge version 1.0.46
Revision 1:7.0.0+r35-2

After installation, the ADB server will start on its but if that’s not the case then you can start the ADB server using:

sudo adb start-server

Step 3. Checking ADB connection.

We will connect an Android device to our system. But before we connect the Android device, we need to make sure that the device has ‘USB Debugging enabled. It can be enabled by going into device Settings & then into the Developer Options (Some devices require that you tap several times on the Android Version in the About Phone section to enable Developer Options). Now once that’s enabled, all we have to do is to connect our Android device to the Ubuntu system using the USB cable. Once the device has been connected, open the terminal on your system and execute the following command:

sudo adb devices

Note: If getting any permissions regarding an error after connecting the device then restart the ADB server and try again.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed ADB and Fastboot. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the ADB and Fastboot on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Android website.