Nexus Tools v4.7 now available! (Patreon)

Nexus Tools is a simple installer for the Android SDK Platform Tools package, which includes ADB, Fastboot, Systrace, and other applications. It's one of my oldest software projects, and still one of the most popular — almost 200 people have used it in just the past week. Since Nexus Tools is just a bash script, it works on macOS, most Linux distros, Chrome OS, and even Windows (through the Linux subsystem).

Google doesn't distribute ARM-native builds of the SDK Platform Tools yet, so when Nexus Tools is run on an ARM-based Mac computer, the apps have to run in Apple's Rosetta 2 compatibility layer. This normally works fine, but I didn't know that Rosetta isn't turned on by default on ARM Macs, and the prompt to enable it (which always works for GUI apps) sometimes doesn't appear for command-line applications. This means if the platform tools were the first x86 applications you installed on your ARM Mac, they might not work at all.

Nexus Tools 4.7 fixes this issue by checking if Rosetta 2 is enabled on ARM Macs, and if not, the user is asked to enable it during the installation process. No more weird compatibility issues (hopefully)!

The update also fixes a bug where Nexus Tools would detect ADB and other applications as already installed if the .nexustools folder was blank. I've also updated the project's readme page with a new compatibility table, which is easier to read.