The Android SDK is composed of multiple packages that are
required for app development. This page lists the most important
command line tools that are available, organized by the packages in
which they're delivered.
You can install and update each package using Android Studio's
SDK Manager or the sdkmanager command line tool. All of the packages
are downloaded into your Android SDK directory, which you can
locate as follows:
In Android Studio, click File > Project
Structure.
Select SDK Location in the left pane. The path is shown
under Android SDK location.
Android SDK Tools
Located in: android_sdk/tools/bin/
See also: SDK
Tools release notes
This package is platform independent and required no matter
which Android platform you are developing on.
If you just need these tools because you're not using Android
Studio, you can download
the SDK Tools here.
Provides insight into the composition of your APK after the
build process completes.
Allows you to create and manage Android Virtual Devices (AVDs)
from the command line.
Allows you to build encrypted and unencrypted APK
expansion files in Opaque Binary Blob (OBB) format.
A code scanning tool that can help you to identify and correct
problems with the structural quality of your code.
Provides the command line interface for running program that
can install an Android app or test package, run it, send keystrokes
to it, takes screenshots, and more.
Allows you to view, install, update, and uninstall packages for
the Android SDK.
This package includes other tools that you don't need to invoke
from the command line (such as ProGuard for code
shrinking and obfuscation).
Android SDK Build Tools
Located in:
android_sdk/build-tools/version/
See also: SDK
Build Tools release notes
This package is required to build Android apps. Most of the
tools in here are invoked by the build tools and not intended for
you. However, the following command line tools might be useful:
Signs APKs and checks whether APK signatures will be verified
successfully on all platform versions that a given APK
supports.
Optimizes APK files by ensuring that all uncompressed data
starts with a particular alignment relative to the start of the
file.
Note: You can have multiple versions of the
build tools to build your app for different Android versions.
Android SDK Platform Tools
Located in:
android_sdk/platform-tools/
See also: SDK Platform Tools release notes
These tools are updated for every new version of the Android
platform to support new features (and sometimes more often to fix
or improve the tools), and each update is backward compatible with
older platform versions.
In addition to downloading from the SDK Manager, you can
download the SDK Platform Tools here.
Android Debug Bridge (adb) is a versatile tool that lets you
manage the state of an emulator instance or Android-powered device.
You can also use it to install an APK on a device.
A command line utility that lets you encode PNG images to the
ETC1 compression standard and decode ETC1 compressed images back to
PNG.
fastboot
Flashes a device with platform and other system images. For
flashing instructions, see Factory Images for
Nexus and Pixel Devices.
This is a tool invoked via adb to view app and system
logs.
Android Emulator
Located in: android_sdk/emulator/
See also: Android
Emulator release notes
This package is required to use the Android Emulator. It
includes the following:.
A QEMU-based device-emulation tool that you can use to debug
and test your applications in an actual Android run-time
environment.
Helps you create a disk image that you can use with the
emulator, to simulate the presence of an external storage card
(such as an SD card).
Note: Prior to revision 25.3.0, the emulator
tools were included with the SDK Tools package.