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TIL Accessing App Data using ADB

· One min read
Shubh A Chudasama
Shubh A Chudasama
Your neighborhood geek

While working on an Android app, I had some issues with the SQLite database and wanted to delete it. This db is stored in the app's internal data directory (/data/data/com.cshubh.myapp), which is inaccessible using file managers on the device.

Android Studio has Device Explorer which allows us to access the internal data directory of a debuggable app, but I didn't want to open that resource hungry IDE for such a simple task. There had to be a way to do it using adb.

Here it is:

adb shell
run-as com.cshubh.myapp

It drops you into a shell in the app directory /data/user/0/com.cshubh.myapp where you can manipulate files and directories.

Pulling a file from the data directory (here, sqlite db):

adb exec-out run-as com.cshubh.myapp cat files/SQLite/myapp.db > pulled.db

Use tar for directories, and cat the archive file instead.

Pushing a file to data directory (here, scratch.txt):

adb push scratch.txt "/data/local/tmp/"
adb shell
run-as com.cshubh.myapp
cp /data/local/tmp/scratch.txt .