wm size

changes the device

Reports the display's resolution, or overrides it so the phone pretends to be a different screen.

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

Syntax

wm size [<width>x<height> | reset]

Flags and arguments

Token	Meaning
<width>x<height>	Ask the display to report this resolution instead of its own.
reset	Drop the override and go back to the physical resolution.

Examples

```
wm size
```
Report only. No argument means no change.
```
wm size 1080x2340
```
Pretend to be a 1080p phone.
```
wm size reset
```
Undo. Learn this one before you need it.

Reading the output

Sample output

Physical size: 1440x3120
Override size: 1080x2340

One line, or two. The override line is printed **only when an override exists**, which is the whole subtlety — its presence is how you know the phone is pretending, and its value is the size that layouts actually see. The physical line never changes.

Output fields

Field	Meaning
Physical size	What the panel really is.
Override size	What the display is reporting instead. Present only while an override is set.

What it changes, and the way back

An override persists across a reboot and changes the size *everything* is drawn at, including the Settings app you would use to undo it. A wrong value can leave controls off the edge of the screen and a phone you cannot fix from the phone. `wm size reset` puts it back, and it works whether or not the override was set from here — so keep that command visible before you set anything.

Version and vendor notes

Set a density at the same time. A layout breakpoint reacts to density-independent pixels — pixels times 160 divided by dpi — so changing the resolution alone tests a shape no real device has.
Nothing here reports a failure usefully: a refusal comes back as a remote-exception line rather than as a size, so treat anything that is not a size as "unknown", not as 0x0.

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 size.

Command	What it does
wm density	Reports the display density, or overrides it — which is what actually moves a layout breakpoint.
screencap	Takes a screenshot, either to a file on the phone or to standard output as PNG.
getevent	Streams raw input events straight from the kernel, or lists what each input device can report.

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.