How to install Android ADB and Fastboot drivers on a MAC [Guide]

If you own and Android device and you also happen to be a power user of Android you must have heard of this term “Android ADB and Fastboot”.

ADB stands for Android debug bridge that acts as a bridge between your phone and your computer whenever you are going to establish a connection while Fastboot is the term used to perform operations in your phone’s bootloader and load custom recoveries, custom kernels and flash other similar things.  The device is booted up in “Fastboot” mode and then it gets connected with the PC to perform the Fastboot operations.

Alright, I guess that was enough to start with. Setting up Android ADB and Fastboot on a windows pc is pretty much easy, but you may get confused when you own an Android smartphone and your computer is a MAC. While there’s a serious conflict between Apple and it’s greatest rival Google because of the mainstream products iOS and Android, it may seem impossible for a while, but wait. That’s actually possible and easy as well.

I just got a chance to setup Android ADB and Fastboot on my MAC recently and I’m going to cook up the detailed guidance provided by the screenshots in the following post. In case you’ve been looking for ADB and Fastboot for MAC, you may have spotted the right place. Let’s go ahead and install the drivers now.

How to install Android ADB and Fastboot drivers on a MAC

1. First of all, make a new folder on your MAC’s desktop or anywhere else where you can easily locate it and name it as “Android”.
2. Download Android SDK tools for MAC or ADB_Fastboot.zip (if you don’t want complete tools).
3. As soon as the SDK download ends, extract the data from adt-bundle-mac-x86 to the “Android” folder you created on your desktop.
4. Once the  folder is extracted, find a file named as “Android”, it should be a Unix executable file.
5. When the Android file opens up, you need to check that Android SDK and Android SDK Platform-Tools are selected.
6. Click on the install package now and wait for the download to finish.
7. Once the download is finished, go to the “Android” folder on your desktop and open the platform-tools folder within it.
8. Now in platform-tools select “adb” and “fastboot”, copy both these and paste into the root of your “Android” folder.
9. That’s all with the ADB and Fastboot installation. We are going to test the drivers now if they are working properly or not.
10. To do so, enable USB debugging mode on your device. You can do so by going to settings > developer options > USB debugging. In case you don’t see the developer options, you will have to enable these. To do so, go to settings > about device > tap the build number for 7 times and find the developer options in settings then.
11. Now connect your Android device to your MAC. Make sure that you’re using original data cable.
12. Now open Terminal Window on your MAC form Applications > Utilities.
13. Type cd and then the path where you saved your Android folder, as shown below
    

    .cd/Users/<yourusername>/Desktop/Android

14. Press enter key now so that it access the “Android” folder.
15. Now you need to enter the “adb” or a “fastboot” command to verify the proper functionality of your newly installed drivers. You may type the following command:
    

    ./adb devices 

16. This will list the devices connected with the MAC. To perform the Fastboot commands you will first boot your device into Fastboot mode and perform your desired function.
17. As soon as you press enter after typing the above command, you will some logs running in the command terminal. If it states as “daemon not working, starting it now on port 5037 / daemon start successfully”, that means the drivers are working perfectly.
18. It will also show your device’s serial number in the command terminal.
19. Although the ADB and Fastboot drivers are completely functional now, but using “cd” and putting a “./” before every fastboot and adb command may seem annoying at times. We’ll add it to the path so that we don’t have to type both these before the adb and fastboot commands.
20. Open the Terminal Window once again and issue this command now
    

     .nano ~/. bash_profile

21. Issuing this command will open a nano editor window.
22. Now you need to add a line containing the path to your Android folder in the Terminal Window. That should be like this
    

    export PATH=${PATH}:/Users/<yourusername>/Desktop/Android

23. Once added, press CTRL + X on your keyboard to close the nano editor now, and then press Y to confirm the editing.
24. Once closed nano editor, you may close the terminal window now.
25. To verify that the path is successfully added or not, open the terminal window again now and issue the following command
26. adb devices
27. You will find that it will list the connected devices while you didn’t type any cd or ./ before the command.
28. Boom!  That’s all. You’ve successfully installed Android ADB and Fastboot drivers on your MAC.
29. You may get your desired .img files, that you will flash in the fastboot mode. The commands will be followed by “fastboot” instead of adb, and the .img files will be placed in the root folder or in the platform-tools folder, it depends on what directory your terminal is accessing for the fastboot commands.

You may check out the useful ADB and Fastboot commands on our site as well now.

Conclusion

That was all. In case you’re confused with something or you’re having some difficulties regarding this post, make sure that you drop your words in the comment box below. We will get back to you as soon as possible.