Kills every process and service belonging to one app.
am force-stop <package>am force-stop com.exampleStop a misbehaving app without uninstalling or clearing it.
top -b -n 1 -m 10Find what is actually burning CPU before you stop anything.
Normally nothing. Treat silence as success and any `Error:`, `Exception` or permission line as failure — and if you want proof, look for the app's processes in `top` afterwards rather than trusting the absence of output.
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| (no output) | The command ran. |
| Error: … | The package could not be resolved, or the call was refused. |
Nothing is deleted and the app starts again the next time it is launched or a broadcast wakes it — but unsaved state in its process is gone, and the alarms and jobs it had scheduled are cancelled until it runs again. There is no undo command; the cure is to open the app.
Android System Monitor runs this command over USB and parses what comes back — a Chromium browser, no SDK, nothing uploaded.
Commands that turn up in the same session as am force-stop.
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
| top | A one-shot process table: CPU share, memory, state and command line. |
| dumpsys meminfo | Which processes are using the most memory, measured as proportional set size. |
| am start | Starts an activity by component or by intent — the fastest way to test whether a deep link resolves. |
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
| am broadcast | Sends a broadcast intent, which is how SystemUI demo mode and other platform receivers are driven from a shell. |
Checked against AOSP, toybox and kernel sources while writing the parsers behind our Web ADB tools. Where a behaviour genuinely varies by Android version or manufacturer, this page says so instead of giving a number that would be wrong on half the phones out there.
Switch on developer options and USB debugging on the phone, plug it in, then run `adb shell <command>` from a machine with platform-tools installed — or run `adb shell` on its own to get an interactive prompt and type the command without the prefix. If the command produces binary output, such as a screenshot, use `adb exec-out` instead of `adb shell`: the plain shell service attaches a terminal, which rewrites newline bytes and corrupts the data.
Not the ones on this reference. They run as the `shell` user, which can manage packages for its own Android user, read most `dumpsys` services, write the settings provider, inject input and read shared storage. Root is only needed for things this reference deliberately avoids — reading another app's private data (except through `run-as` on a debuggable build), writing system partitions, or reading `/data/anr` directly.
Either the Android version or the manufacturer. Some flags and fields arrived in a specific release, and those are noted per command. The rest is OEM patching, which hits `dumpsys` hardest: a dump is debug output whose text is whatever the service author last printed, and manufacturers change it and backport their changes. Read fields by name rather than by position, and treat an unfamiliar shape as a difference rather than as a failure.
For many commands, yes — the Web ADB tools on this site talk to a phone over WebUSB from a Chromium-based desktop browser, with no SDK installed and nothing uploaded. Each page links to the tool that runs its command, when one exists. Two limits are worth knowing: only one program can hold the ADB interface at a time, so a desktop `adb server` has to be stopped first, and `adb forward` and `adb reverse` cannot work in a browser at all.
Would rather click than type? The Web ADB Toolkit runs commands like this from a browser over USB. Or browse every command.