Juri Strumpflohner Follow Juri is a full stack developer and tech lead with a special passion for the web and frontend development. He creates online videos for Egghead.io, writes articles on his blog and for tech magazines, speaks at conferences and holds training workshops. Juri is also a recognized Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies

Deploy Android APK OTA Using Symbolic Links and Dropbox

Feb 10, 2011 1 min read

Couple of time ago I wrote a blog post describing how you can use Dropbox for deploying your Android APK basically over-the-air to your device. That involved copying your APK to a dedicated Dropbox folder that can then be accessed from your Android device to install it.

Instead of copying manually, on Unix based systems (Linux, OSX,..) you can also make use of symbolic links.

Open the terminal.
Navigate to your Dropbox folder where you want to have your APK file
type ln -s </path-to-your-apk/ApkName.apk> <ApkName.apk>

For example consider I have my Android project at /Users/Juri/Projects/MyProjName, then I would create a link that looks like

ln -s /Users/Juri/Projects/MyProjName/bin/MyProjName.apk MyProjName.apk

Every time I build my project inside Eclipse, a new APK will be created which will then automatically be uploaded to Dropbox.

(If you don't have Dropbox you can get an invitation with 250MB additional storage space here)

Questions? Thoughts? Hit me up on Twitter