How to examine SharedPreferences from adb shell?

Question

Now that we can Examining sqlite3 Databases from a Remote Shell, is it possible to examine SharedPreferences from adb shell? Since it would be much more convenient to examine an

Answer 1

Fine, I found the file just after I raised the question above. (It seem asking questions publicly stimulate me to search answers by myself much more diligently, since I don't want my dear peers to view me as a lazy programmer.)

It is an XML file under /data/data/your.app.package.name/shared_prefs, and the file name is your.app.package.name_preferences.xml. It is really easy to modify the preferences when you figure out that the content is just a key-value map.

Answer 2

I am using this convenient one-liner to pull, edit in vim, and push shared preferences for an app:

APP_ID=com.myapp; adb pull /data/data/${APP_ID}/shared_prefs/${APP_ID}_preferences.xml /tmp/${APP_ID}_preferences.xml && vim /tmp/${APP_ID}_preferences.xml && adb push /tmp/${APP_ID}_preferences.xml /data/data/${APP_ID}/shared_prefs/

Just set APP_ID to your application id.

Note that this assumes you are using the default file name for shared preferences, as obtained from PreferenceManager.getDefaultSharedPreferences(context). Also, ADB needs to be running in root mode: adb root

Answer 3

First pull shared preferences file from device. This requires root permision.

adb pull /data/data/org.test/shared_prefs/MyKeys.xml MyKeys.xml

Now MyKeys.xml is stored in current directory of your system.

Modify values by

vim MyKeys.xml

After editing file save changes and push to device.

adb push MyKeys.xml /data/data/org.test/shared_prefs/MyKeys.xml

To Verify your changes

adb shell
cat /data/data/org.test/shared_prefs/MyKeys.xml

Answer 4

If the app is debugable you could do:

$ adb shell
$ run-as <app-package-id>
$ cat /data/data/<app-package-id>/shared_prefs/prefs.xml

Note that the preference might be stored in another file so better check the directory to find it:

$ ls /data/data/<app-package-id>/shared_prefs/

Answer 5

If you'd like to edit Shared Preferences from adb scripts, please see how to get root on Android emulator here. (If using 'adb root' is not enought in your case).

If you wish to install vi editor/busybox on Android go here. [OPTIONAL]

To edit a shared preference value, you need to first COPY app's xml file to SDstorage, copy it to your local filesystem, edit and then upload back to the phone.

adb shell
su
cp /data/data/com.your.package.name/shared_prefs/com.your.package.name_preferences.xml /storage/emulated/0/
adb pull /storage/emulated/0/com.your.package.name_preferences.xml
nano com.your.package.name_preferences.xml
adb push com.your.package.name_preferences.xml /storage/emulated/0/com.your.package.name_preferences.xml
cp /storage/emulated/0/com.your.package.name_preferences.xml /data/data/com.your.package.name/shared_prefs/com.your.package.name_preferences.xml

Don't forget to RESTART the app to see the results.

Answer 6

If you are using shared_preferences for Flutter, the file is /data/data/your.app.package.name/shared_prefs/FlutterSharedPreferences.xml. Note that if you edit the file, you must restart your app for your changes to be visible to your app. Doing a hot reload/hot restart doesn't expose your manual changes to your app.