adb-mcp: Android emulator and device control over adb MCP server

adb-mcp

An MCP server that drives Android emulators and devices over adb

Boot an AVD, screenshot, read the UI hierarchy, tap/swipe/type, set a device lock, read logcat, run Gradle builds and tests. 79 tools, from Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, or any MCP client over stdio.

It is the Android counterpart to XcodeBuildMCP, built on the official Go MCP SDK.

describeui → tapon_text → screenshot, driven live against a real emulator (emulator-5556), showing the actual tool calls and their actual output.

Android is a trademark of Google LLC. adb-mcp is an independent, unofficial

tool built for Android and is not affiliated with, sponsored, or endorsed by Google.

The Android robot above is reproduced/modified from work created and shared by

Google and used according to terms described in the

Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License.

Why

Driving Android by hand means a long runbook of raw adb commands, and it is easy to get wrong (stale tap coordinates, CRLF-corrupted screenshots, forgetting exec-out, guessing coordinates off a downscaled image). This server bakes that knowledge into its tools, so the agent doesn't have to relearn it:

so the image reader accepts them.

• Screenshots use exec-out screencap (no CRLF corruption) and are auto-downscaled

land where you mean them to, no guessing off the image) and retries the transient "could not get idle state" failure on its own.

• describeui returns each element's center in true device pixels** (so taps

The workflow itself ships as readable resources the agent can pull up mid-task (the observe→act loop, native PIN/lock handling, crash triage, see below) instead of relearning them each session.

Getting started

1. Prerequisites

via $ANDROIDHOME / $ANDROIDSDK_ROOT, else the platform default (~/Library/Android/sdk on macOS). If your MCP client launches the server without those set, pass --sdk /path/to/sdk in the client config's args (the server then exports it, so Gradle finds the SDK too). doctor prints the location it resolved.

• Android SDK with platform-tools (adb) and emulator. The server finds it

• At least one AVD (create one in Android Studio's Device Manager).

Go is not required: releases ship prebuilt binaries, and it's only needed to build from source.

2. Install

On macOS/Linux:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/iksnerd/adb-mcp/main/install.sh | sh

The script (install.sh) picks the right archive for your OS/architecture, verifies its SHA-256 against the release's checksums.txt, and installs to ~/.local/bin (override with BIN_DIR=...; pin a version with VERSION=v0.17.0).

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.