wm density

changes the device

Reports the display density, or overrides it — which is what actually moves a layout breakpoint.

Command: adb shell wm density
Commands: Display and capture
Risk: changes the device

Syntax

wm density [<dpi> | reset]

Flags and arguments

Token	Meaning
<dpi>	The density to report. Android's own buckets run from 120 to 640, and vendors ship values in between.
reset	Drop the override and go back to the physical density.

Examples

```
wm density
```
Report only.
```
wm density 420
```
With `wm size 1080x2340`, this is a 411 dp wide phone — a real breakpoint.
```
wm density reset
```
Undo.

Reading the output

Sample output

Physical density: 560
Override density: 420

Same shape as `wm size`: the physical value always, the override only while one is set. The number that decides which layout you get is dp, so the useful quantity is width in pixels times 160 divided by this dpi — 1080 px at 420 dpi is 411 dp, and the same 1080 px at 320 dpi is a 540 dp tablet-ish layout.

Output fields

Field	Meaning
Physical density	The panel's real dpi.
Override density	What is being reported instead. Present only while an override is set.

What it changes, and the way back

Like a size override, this survives a reboot and changes the scale of every interface element on the phone, the Settings app included. A density of 800 on a phone panel leaves about one and a half buttons visible, and you cannot tap your way out of it. `wm density reset` is the way back; keep it to hand before you experiment.

Version and vendor notes

Changing density without changing size, or the other way round, produces a device shape that does not exist. Set both.
0 and absurdly large values are ways to make a screen unreadable rather than ways to test one.

We have a UI for this

Android ADB Toolbox runs this command over USB and parses what comes back — a Chromium browser, no SDK, nothing uploaded.

Open Android ADB Toolbox

Related commands

Commands that turn up in the same session as wm density.

Command	What it does
wm size	Reports the display's resolution, or overrides it so the phone pretends to be a different screen.
screencap	Takes a screenshot, either to a file on the phone or to standard output as PNG.
settings put	Writes a value into the settings provider — the mechanism behind most developer-options tricks.

More Display and capture commands

Command	What it does
screenrecord	Records the screen to an MP4 file on the device.

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.

Frequently asked questions

How do I run an adb shell command?

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.

Do adb shell commands need root?

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.

Why does the output look different on my phone?

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.

Can I run this from a browser instead of a terminal?

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.