Nexus Tools is now discontinued (Patreon)

I have officially ended development of Nexus Tools, my installer for ADB, Fastboot, and other Android system tools for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's for a good reason, though: the alternatives are better and more accessible.

When I made the first version of Nexus Tools for Linux and Mac in 2013, Google did not provide ADB, Fastboot, and other common Android utilities as simple downloads. You had to install the Android SDK first, or download the binaries from somewhere else and add them to your system's path. Some Linux distributions had them available as a package, but they were often out of date. Nexus Tools turned the installation into a one-step process, using a Bash script and mirrored copies of Google's binaries.

Later versions added improved support for Chrome OS and the Windows Subsystem for Linux (at the time, Bash for Windows 10), udev rules installation to fix USB detection issues on Linux, fixes for different shell environments, and other small improvements. Nexus Tools was covered by MakeUseOf, XDA, Android Police, 9to5Google, Wccftech, Redmond Pie, and other outlets over the years. In 2021, I rewrote it in Dart and added support for Windows.

However, Nexus Tools gradually became unnecessary. In 2017, Google finally created an official download for ADB and Fastboot without the Android SDK, and Nexus Tools switched to that method shortly afterwards. That download also made it easy for other package managers to offer ADB and Fastboot, and keep them updated along with all your other installed software.

The easy availability of other methods, along with fewer breaking changes in new versions of Android, has contributed to Nexus Tools usage dropping over the years. Nexus Tools peaked at around 500 users per week in 2023, and now averages around 50 users per week.

Nexus Tools is cited in many guides and videos around Android modding and development, and I didn't want to break those resources. If you run one of the Nexus Tools installation scripts today, you will see instructions for installing ADB and Fastboot with another package manager, such as Homebrew, Winget, APT, or DNF. The Readme file in the GitHub repository contains the same instructions.

If you already have those applications installed on your system with Nexus Tools, the script will offer to delete those copies, so they don't conflict with the other methods. There are also standalone uninstall scripts for Mac, Linux, and Windows in the repository.

Nexus Tools had a good run, but it's turned into a package manager for one specific package, and it's just not needed at this point.

Nexus Tools statistics

As a final farewell, here are some fun statistics about Nexus Tools, using the data collected from November 2023 to February 2026 through Plausible Analytics.

Installations by platform

Windows 64-bit x86: 23.4k

macOS 64-bit x86: 7.9k

macOS Apple Silicon: 6.8k

Linux 64-bit x86: 3.2k

ChromeOS 64-bit x86: 1.7k

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 64-bit x86: 252

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 64-bit ARM: 41

Installations by country

United States: 5.9k

Poland: 1.4k

India: 1.3k

United Kingdom: 1.2k

Canada: 1k

Italy: 976

Germany: 814

Vietnam: 580

Russia: 620

Bye, Nexus Tools. 👋