Installing Apps to Android mobile in bulk using Laptop

Mobile phones are becoming useful sidekick apart from performing the basic function of making calls,  so much so that they are now managing various aspects of life like finances, science, day to day converters, communication and messaging , social media and so on.

A smart phone becomes a very useful tool in the hands of user depending on the apps it has been loaded with. Now here comes the problem! Apps are installed over the months and years  and if for any reason, a new phone is purchased or old one is formatted, all the apps have to be installed one by one which becomes tedious. The following steps will guide you as to how to take backup of all your apps in your laptop from your old phone  and then load them into your new phone in a single click..

Ok, so here are the steps..I have tried to keep it as simple as possible.

PREPARING THE PHONE & LAPTOP

1 Developer options have to be enabled on your phone to do this exercise. To enable developer options, open settings app, select System, scroll to bottom and select About Phone, scroll to bottom and tap Build number 7 times, return to previous screen to find Developer options near bottom

2. turn on USB Debugging in developer options.

3. Connect the phone to laptop by means of a USB cable and select USB debugging (ADB) mode., a seperate CD drive can be seen mounted in my computer containing the phone USB drivers for laptop, double click and install the drivers( this may differ from phone to phone, in some phones, you may have to download the USB drivers from manufacturers website and install)

4. download and unzip SDK platform-tools_r28.0.1 for windows in a directory , say D:\adb-fastboot\platform-tools

5. Right click my computer, go to properties, go to advanced system settings, click on environment variables button , in system variables scroll down and click on  path, click edit button, modify the path by adding a semicolon and inserting D:\adb-fastboot\platform-tools after semicolon as shown in screenshot below. click ok all the way to close the advanced system settings. This is being done so that you can run adb command from any path.
                                                 

6. reboot the laptop and open command window, and type adb, you should see something like this screenshot:-

now your laptop is ready to send commands to your phone via ADB

PREPARING THE PRINT.BAT FILE IN LAPTOP

1. Install myphone explorer app. My phone explorer is a nice nifty app which can be used to take backup of your apps, contacts, sms etc to your laptop . It also has a useful sync feature which can be used to sync files between your laptop and Phone external memory, if you happen to keep your work related stuff on your phone for ready reference.


2.  Install Myphone explorer on your laptop/PC.

3. turn on  your wifi hotspot on your mobile and connect your laptop to it.

4. open myphone explorer in both laptop and mobile phone and using the laptop app go to File-> connect to phone. click on Extras menu  -> Create backup as per the screenshot below. Now all your apps are stored in a folder in  laptop (say D:\apps-1)

5. open a command prompt window and cd to D:\apps-1. type dir /s /b > print.txt , this creates a file called print.txt in the folder. now, open this file in notepad and replace D:\ with adb install -r D:\  for all the occurrences.

6. Now, you might notice that some filenames of apps have space between them, we need to replace space with an _ (underscore) character everywhere. so we have another nifty vbscript file to do that for us. Download the file here , open the vbscript file in notepad and change the path in the Set fol line like Set fol = fso.GetFolder ("D:\apps-1"). what this vbscript file does is read each filename in

D:\apps-1 directory and find blank space in them and replace with a underscore. The reason why this is being done is the command line adb install fails on space in filenames so it has to be replaced with an underscore.

 

7. open print.txt in notepad and  click save as and enter filename as  print.bat and file type as all as shown in screenshot below. This will generate a batch file called print.bat

 

8. double click print.bat file to open a command window to install each app one by one as can be seen in screenshot below!

 

 

 

 

References:

 https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/64353/how-to-batch-install-apks-from-computer-to-android-without-actually-touching-my