Before flashing your Android phone with custom ROM, you need custom Recovery ROM such as

• ClockworkMod Recovery (CWM)
• Team Win Recovery Project (TWRP)

The default “Recovery ROM’ comes with your phone does not allow to flash/install custom ROM. Hence, before flashing your phone with custom ROM, custom “Recovery” is needed. Before flashing custom “recovery ROM”, you need tools to do that.

adb & fastboot are the tools which will use to flash Android’s “recovery” ROM. Let’s see how to install ADB & FASTBOOT in Mac OSX.

1. Download Android SDK

Android SDK can be downloaded at Android Developer website. Click the link here to visit the website. Choose “Download the SDK. ADT bundle for Mac”

2. Install and Configure

After ADT bundle has been downloaded, extract the file into download folder.

I have Android SDK store in my “Work” directory and renamed it from adt-bundle-mac-x86_64-20131030 to AndroidDevel “~/Document/Work/AndroidDevel”

adb and fastboot command tool can be found at “sdk/platform-tools” folder. You will need to run this 2 command tools in order to flash your phone.

3. Configure with Terminal

Open up your “Terminal” and open .profile shell profile.

# vi .profile 

Look for the “export PATH” and expand further by adding in platform-tools folder

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:~/Document/Work/AndroidDevel/sdk/platform-tools 

Depend on where do you store the tools. It may not me same with my configuration. Please do not miss the “:” semicolon, it means to expand and include other folder. Save your file and refresh your bash environment with command below

# source ~/.profile 

4. Complete and Look For Your Device

Plugin your device with USB cable and prompt for your device with command below

# adb devices 

You should be able to see the list of device as below

Congrats, adb & fastboot are installed on your Mac OSX Next post I will show how to flash recovery ROM on a HTC ONE M7 device.