Tag: geek

My phone has been iffy for the last few weeks, with random freezes or reboots. Yesterday, I got a notification for an official OTA software update. I hoped that it might fix the situation. I did, but in the most f’you way possible. The update caused the phone to get stuck in a perpetual reboot cycle. The only way out of it was a full, hard, reset.

Now this was something that I’d been thinking of for a while, but still, really bad timing. Although I had a full backup of my phone and most of it was already synced to Google, it’s still annoying as fuck to have to re-download and restore everything. The devil is in the details – how your app screens were setup to the point where muscle memory could open a particular app – which isn’t 100% back to normal.

I have all my music, but all my playlists got borked.
I have all my photos, but the timestamps didn’t restore properly so now they’re all mishmashed.
I have to get a new activation code for my online banking, because Switzerland.

The most annoying thing – one of my go-to stress-reliever/time-waster games got removed from the Google play store!! Happily, Katy still had it on her phone, so with a bit of ingenuity and USB debugging, I was able to extract it from her phone and sideload it on mine. Note to self in case of future need, the magic mantra is this:

Determine the package name of the app, e.g. “com.example.someapp”.
adb shell pm list packages

Get the full path name of the APK file for the desired package.
adb shell pm path com.example.someapp

The output will look something like
package:/data/app/com.example.someapp-2.apk
or
package:/data/app/com.example.someapp-nfFSVxn_CTafgra3Fr_rXQ==/base.apk

Using the full path name from the previous step, pull the APK file from the Android device to the development box.
adb pull /data/app/com.example.someapp-2.apk path/to/desired/destination