Backup all installed APK's from phone using ADB I have done many reinstalls of my OS on my Android phone in the last few months for various reasons. Every time, the biggest hassle is manually searching, downloading and installing all the apps I had in my previous installation.
I use a degoogled custom rom, downloading apps from F-Droid and Aurora Store, so no Google solutions are acceptable.
What I want, is to have a way to keep on my computer a copy of all the apks of the installed apps of my phone, and have it automatically updated too, so that when the time comes to reformat my phone and install everything all over, I will be able to simply adb install all of the apks in no time, instead of doing it all manually and waiting for them to also be downloaded. Any suggestions for how I can make that happen with existing programs, preferably open source?
If it's just the APK files, you could use the getapk script provided in the tools/ directory of my little helper Adebar, calling it e.g. with getapk user to retrieve all user-installed apps. You won't be interested in system apps, but for completeness:
$ getapk


getapk
Extracting APK files from a connected device.
getapk lets you extract a single app's APK, or that of all user apps,
all system apps, or all apps altogether – depending on what parameter
you passed it.

Syntax: /mnt/av/src/git/adebar/tools/getapk &lt;package_name&gt; | user | system | all

This requires ADB being available on your computer. Should you not have that yet, you might wish to take a look at Is there a minimal installation of ADB? here at our site. You don't write what OS you are on; getapk is a Bash script (as Adebar is a Bash tool), so it works best on Linux, was reported working fine on MAcOS, and also in Cygwin.
To have that automated, you could create a cron job (Linux/Mac; no idea how that works on Windows but AFAIK there's something like a &quot;Scheduler&quot; you could probably use). APKs will be named &lt;packageName&gt;.apk (e.g. org.fdroid.fdroid.apk) once retrieved, so always retrieving them to the same directory (i.e. calling the script while inside that directory) should take care that you have always the latest versions in there and no more. Though it wouldn't delete APKs of apps you've uninstalled later ;)