How to do remote installs of Android apps?

In this post, I want to show a solution that can help to quickly install your set of desired open source Android apps from FDroid, by installing them with adb. It also works with Google Play, but you have to download them as .apk files first. This is not possible on Google Play directly, but for example with third-party services like downloader-apk.com. Be aware of potential security implications though.

So it would be possible to have a single script running on your computer and bulk-installing all your Android apps on your phone. However, once you installed your desired apps once in any way, it is faster and more comfortable to use App2zip, App2zip Pro or ZIPme to create a .zip file with your apps that you can then install in recovery mode on any phone you want them on.

The process for unattended install of Android apps via adb works as follows:

  1. Enable USB debugging on the Android phone. This is needed for adb to work. [instructions]
  2. Install Google Play. We install a minimized version of Google Apps here that contains just Google Play and required libraries. You can install everything else from Google Apps via the Google Play Store later. [TODO: Minimize this further by installing just the three essential apps, saving 70 more MiB].
    1. Download the minimized Google Apps package from  "[APP][MINIMALISM] Google Play 3.10.10 | Market ONLY Gapps for GB/ICS/JB4.1/JB4.2".
    2. Push it to the phone's SD card:
      adb push jb42-signed.zip /sdcard/jb42-signed.zip
    3. Reboot into your favorite recovery:
      adb reboot recovery
    4. Install the ZIP file from the SD card with your recovery software.
  3. Install APKs. For every APK, simply call [see adb command line arguments]:
    adb install filename.apk
    Due to permissions issues, on some Ubuntu host systems you will have to do:
    sudo adb install filename.apk

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