Droid Explorer working on Non-Rooted Device

I have started doing some work on removing the dependency on rooted device, specifically, busybox. This is no where near complete, and is buggy, at best. As you can see from the screenshot, you can see most of the folders, but if you try to go in to some of them, you will not see any files. This is my Nexus 6P, which is not rooted, connected to Droid Explorer. I do not have busybox or anything else special installed.

It doesn’t look like much, but this is a big change to the code base. I have been removing code from the Core.CommandRunner, the code that handles 99% of the communication between your computer and your device. Instead it is making use of madb, which minimizes the need for adb, and only uses it to act as the adb server. While the old code used adb as the server, but also depended on the adb client to do the communication to the device. Madb is the client, and it does all the communication to the adb server.

 

No binaries available yet, as I stated, this is very early. The code will be available on the Droid Explorer Github soon.

Droid Explorer 1.0 on Non-Rooted Devices

I hit somewhat of a milestone today. I got the Droid Explorer 1.0 branch to build. Not only that, about 90% of the communication from Droid Explorer and the device is now done through MadBee. That’s the Managed Android Debug Bridge, if you were not aware. MadBee is basically an enhanced port of the Android Debug Bridge library that ships as part of the Android SDK. There are other features that I have added to it, like the ability to check if the device has BusyBox, or if the device can execute SU commands.

MadBee is available from NuGet, but is still very young. I occasionally notice some issues with how things work while using it as the “power” behind Droid Explorer, and go in and make some modifications. But I always update on NuGet, but that means I may update there often.

What, exactly does MadBee mean for Droid Explorer? Well, I am glad I asked. MadBee is the link between the device and Droid Explorer. Since it is based off the original Android Debug Bridge, it was initially meant for non-rooted devices. It has always been my intentions, and goal, to have Droid Explorer working on ALL devices, not just rooted ones. MadBee helps make that happen. Now, MadBee does not circumvent any security that is already in place on your device, so if you don’t have a rooted device, you will not be able to perform any tasks that would require root, like remount /system with read-write.

There is still a lot of work to be done before this build of Droid Explorer will be ready for the public, but here is a teaser of Droid Explorer connected to a non-rooted Galaxy Tab.

Droid Explorer in the top 20

Droid Explorer has had over 3000 downloads in the last 7 days. This is enough to put it in the top 20 most downloaded this week on CodePlex out of the 16,518 projects hosted there. Finally getting more downloads then projects like Facebook Developer Toolkit, IronPython and BlogEngine.Net.

 

Managed Android Debug Bridge has a new logo, and is now known as Mad Bee. Someone mentioned it to me, I liked the idea and went with it.