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Android 12 Developer Preview 1 Changelog: Google Finally Restricts the Power of “adb backup”

Lam Pham
The Startup
Published in
4 min readMar 1, 2021
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

A few months ago, I wrote a blog explaining the power of the command line

adb backup

To summarize, “adb backup” is an official way to leak private data in certain apps. I said “official” because it’s designed and allowed by Android’s creator and there are also other unofficial ways to do it such as rooting a device.

With the Android 12 preview release, Google has announced a strong restriction (even a permanent removal in the future) of this command. It says that:

To help protect private app data, Android 12 changes the default behavior of the adb backup command. For apps that target Android 12, when a user runs the adb backup command, app data is excluded from any other system data that is exported from the device.

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The Startup
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Lam Pham
Lam Pham

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