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Rohindh R
Rohindh R

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Droidective: the all-in-one toolkit for mobile app debugging, and more

Every mobile developer knows the ritual. One terminal tab tailing logcat, another one for adb commands you half-remember, scrcpy running in a third, Reactotron in its own window, and a notes file full of incantations. Debugging one app somehow requires five tools.

I spent the past months building a way out of that. Droidective is a free, open-source macOS app that puts the entire mobile debugging workflow behind a single Raycast-style command palette. Press the hotkey, type what you want to do, hit enter. That is the whole workflow.

The Droidective command palette searching across 56 tools

One palette, 56 tools

Everything is a searchable command: live logcat with per-app filters and a crash catcher, screen mirroring and recording with full device control (the scrcpy server is bundled, so there is nothing to install), a device file explorer with push and pull, an apps explorer that installs, uninstalls, force-stops, clears data, toggles runtime permissions and browses a debug app's sandbox, wireless ADB with Android 11 pairing, and a performance monitor with live per-core CPU, RAM, FPS and network charts you can record and export.

There is also a whole state simulation hub: fake the battery level, force dark mode, change locale, scale fonts and density, set a proxy. Every override is tracked, so one action resets the device to a clean state.

React Native, without the extra apps

Droidective runs a full Reactotron server inside itself, so you get the timeline, state browser and REPL without installing the desktop app. There is a Hermes JS console speaking Chrome DevTools Protocol directly to your app, plus Metro port forwarding, dev menu and JS reload commands.

React Native tools with the built-in Reactotron debugger

And more

An APK studio that inspects, decompiles (jadx and apktool), rebuilds and signs APKs. One-click Frida server setup for security testing. A multi-tab terminal with split panes where every shell is already scoped to the selected device. Booted iOS Simulators appear right next to your Android devices, with screenshots, deep links, push notification testing and state simulation dispatched to simctl.

Tabs and split panes: logcat beside a live screen mirror

How it is built

Native Swift 6 + SwiftUI. All the logic lives in a UI-free Swift package with 705 tests that run without a device, and every action logs the exact adb command it executed, so the tool teaches you adb instead of hiding it.

Droidective is completely free and open source. It was built to serve the mobile community, not to sell anything.

If you build, test or support mobile apps and there is a tool you wish existed in that palette, tell me in the comments. That is how the last twenty features got in.

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