waterfall

Waterfall project

Waterfall allows controlling Android devices via a gRPC interface.

Using the tool with the emulator

In order to use Waterfall, the emulator needs to be started with qemu pipes enabled.

emulator @${AVD} -unix-pipe sockets/h2o will start the emulator allowing outbound connections to an abstract unix domain socket in the emulator working dir.

Start the server on the device. By default it will try to connect to sockets/h2o, but this can be configured via the addr flag.

bazel build //waterfall/server:server_bin_386

adb push sever_bin_386 /data/local/tmp

# On the device:
/data/local/tmp/sever_bin_386 [--addr=<qemu|tcp|unix>:addr]

Start the forwarding server. This server forwards the connection from the host to the device through the qemu pipe.

bazel build waterfall/forward:forward_bin

./forward_bin --listen_addr <tcp|unix>:addr --connect_addr <qemu|tcp|unix>:addr

The client can start a regular gRPC connection to --listen_addr.

Using the tool with physical devices

At the moment, Waterfall has no USB support (though this is a planned feature). In order to work with physical devices, the server needs to be started on the device listening on a normal TCP or Unix address and forwarded through ADB.

adb forward tcp:${server_port} tcp:${server_port}

Command line client

A client compatible with ADB command line is available under waterfall/client/adb. This client can be used as a drop in replacement for ADB.

Top level components:

Waterfall has three principal components:

• A gRPC server running on the device.
• A gRPC client running on the host computer.
• A forwarding server that proxies the client connections to the server.

This is not an officially supported Google product.