Every sensor the phone has, with its vendor, type, rates and batching — plus a buffer of recent readings.
dumpsys sensorservicedumpsys sensorserviceThe sensor table and the last readings per sensor.
getevent -lpThe other half of the input picture: raw evdev devices, including the touchscreen.
Sample output
Sensor List:
0x00000001) LSM6DSO Accelerometer | STMicro | ver: 1 | type: android.sensor.accelerometer(1) | perm: n/a | flags: 0x00000000
continuous | minRate=12.50Hz | maxRate=416.00Hz | FIFO (max,reserved) = (3000, 600) events | non-wakeUp
Accelerometer: last 50 events
1 (ts=12345.678901234, wall=13:37:01.234) 0.12, 9.81, 0.03,Each sensor is a hex handle, a close paren, then pipe-separated fields, followed by a tab-indented line of rates and batching. Further down, the recent-event buffers are keyed by the sensor's *name* — not its handle — and are printed newest first. Field order is not stable across versions or manufacturers, so read by label.
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 0x…) | The sensor handle. The one token every version prints. |
| type: android.sensor.x(N) | The platform type string and its numeric value. |
| minRate / maxRate | Hertz — and the naming is inverted from what it looks like: minRate comes from the maximum delay and maxRate from the minimum delay. |
| FIFO (max,reserved) | Batching capacity in events. `no batching` appears instead when there is none. |
| wakeUp / non-wakeUp | Whether the sensor can wake the phone from suspend. |
| ts= | Seconds on the boot-time clock, which a suspend can make non-monotonic in the buffer. |
| [value masked] | The caller lacks the permission that sensor needs; the reading is withheld, not missing. |
Android Sensor Tester 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 dumpsys sensorservice.
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
| getevent | Streams raw input events straight from the kernel, or lists what each input device can report. |
| dumpsys thermalservice | Whether the phone is throttling, and every thermal zone the hardware layer reports, in degrees Celsius. |
| wm size | Reports the display's resolution, or overrides it so the phone pretends to be a different screen. |
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
| dumpsys battery | The battery service's live state: level, status, health, voltage and temperature. |
| dumpsys diskstats | Free space per partition, a disk write latency check, and a cached per-app breakdown of what is using storage. |
| dumpsys meminfo | Which processes are using the most memory, measured as proportional set size. |
| dumpsys package | Everything the package manager knows about one app: version, paths, flags, install source and per-user state. |
| dumpsys activity activities | Which app is in the foreground, and the task and stack structure behind it. |
| dumpsys dropbox | The platform's ring buffer of crashes, ANRs and tombstones — how you read ANR traces without root. |
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.