So you want to have some more control over your android phone? Sure you do. For any, just slightly above userlevel stuff you might want to do with it, you require the tools <b>ADB</b> (the <b>A</b>ndroid <b>D</b>eveloper <b>B</b>ridge) and Fastboot (<b>Fast</b> <b>boot</b>). Since I am still quite ignorant to all of this, I decided to write a small reminder blagpost for myself on how to get those tools. Oh yea, this is all on Windows. Linux users have package managers and stuff like this just works.
You will need the <a href="http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html" target="_blank">Java Development Kit</a>. After you got that, you need to get the <a href="https://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html#Other" target="_blank">Android SDK Tools</a>. Download <b>"SDK Tools Only"</b>. Once you have installed it, open the <b>SDK Manager</b>. It will want to install a lot of stuff, but unless you actually want to do development, you might not even have to install anything. I installed the following only:
* Android SDK Tools
* Android SDK Platform-tools
* Google USB Drivers
Assuming that `%GSDK%` is the path where you installed the SDK tools, you will find the applications `adb.exe` and `fastboot.exe` in
```text
%GSDK%\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools
```
You might want to add that to your path, or not. Fun fact. If you use <a href="https://www.cygwin.com/" target="_blank">cygwin</a>, you can call `adb shell` from a cygwin terminal and then invoke `bash` on the phone, and the cygwin terminal will interpret all the color codes sent back from the phone's bash correctly, so you can have a really comfortable shell open on your phone:
<figure id="attachment_3364" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3364" style="width: 300px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="http://blag.nullteilerfrei.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/shell-on-nexus.png"><img decoding="async" src="http://blag.nullteilerfrei.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/shell-on-nexus-300x161.png" alt="Shell from Cygwin on LG G3" width="300" height="161" class="size-medium wp-image-3364" srcset="https://blag.nullteilerfrei.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/shell-on-nexus-300x161.png 300w, https://blag.nullteilerfrei.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/shell-on-nexus.png 1007w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-3364" class="wp-caption-text">MinTTY on LG G3 sporting <a href="http://www.cyanogenmod.org/" target="_blank">CM12</a></figcaption></figure>