Using adb with Wileyfox Swift/Swift2/Swift2 plus

Published 22 October 2015 under wileyfox, swift, adb, android

If you've got one of the nice new Wileyfox Android smartphones then of course you'll want to use the Android debugger with it. This should be easy, and in the end, it is. However, there is currently one important piece of information that you need.

adb devices

consistently told me that there were no devices, despite it showing up on lsusb. I tried various suggestions, such as use ptp rather than mtp, but none of these worked.

There are two possible problems that we've come across:

1. Android debugging is not enabled.
   To enable this go to Settings/Developer Options and there should be an "Android debugging" switch, which needs to be enabled.
2. The second requirement is to put the vendor hex string into an initialisation file on your adb machine. Add the string 0x2970 to the file

~/.android/adb_usb.ini

Before adb will recognise your devices you need to run

adb kill-server

adb start-server

Then try running adb devices again and it should recognise your Wileyfox.