Dummy Devices

Dummy-Devices

Dummy-Devices are a kind of „Software-Clone“ created from a real device: All details Adebar usually gathers from your Android device via ADB are stored into text files. This is mostly intended for development and troubleshooting purposes – for example, if you have problems with Adebar and your device, you can create an issue, send the „Dummy Device Data“ – and someone experienced can look into it without having the real device.

Creating a dummy device

For creation of dummy devices, you find a script named mk_dummy in the tools/ directory of Adebar. This script will do most of the work for you; just follow these steps:

1. copy the script into a „working directory“ where the dummy shall be created
2. enable USB Debugging in your device and connect it to your computer
3. in the directory where you copied mk_dummy into, run ./mk_dummy <name> (replace <name> with the name you want to give that device, e.g. bqx5_90 for a BQ Aquaris X5 running Android 9. Note that no spaces are allowed in the name.
4. watch the process: mk_dummy will create a new directory with the name you gave the device (bqx5_90 in above example), collect the details from your „real device“, and store them into files located in that directory. This can take a little – but not much longer than a minute.

Now you've got your DummyDevice. If you want to send that to someone for investigation, simply pack up the directory into an archive, like

• zip -ro9 bqx5_90.zip bqx5_90/* or
• tar cjf bqx5_90.tar.bz2 bqx5_90/* or
• tar czf bqx5_90.tar.gz bqx5_90/*

Now you can transfer the archive by mail, upload or whatever.

Using a dummy device

If you want to make use of a dummy device yourself, just create a config for it (see Configuration for details). The two important parameters here are:

• DUMMY_BASE=$HOME/adebar/dummies (where your dummy devices reside)
• DUMMY=bqx5_90 (name of the dummy device you want to use)

Optionally you can also specify a different STORAGE_BASE. Everything else is configured as done for a real device – though some things will be ignored by Adebar here:

• things to be transferred to the device (this cannot be done for dummies)
• some app-specific details (like disabled components)
• files to be pulled (like configuration files, or XPrivacy data)

Sending dummy device data

Before sending your DummyDevice data across the network, be aware that they can contain personal data – so you want to sanitze them. For example, replace email addresses in the dumpsys_account file by something like [email protected]. Further, your device's IMEI might be present in dumpsys_iphonesubinfo or getprop, dumpsys_telephony.registry might contain phone numbers, and so on.

It might not be the best idea to place such a dummy device into the public. So better send them in a safe way (e.g. a PGP encrypted mail). When unsure, ask.