Obtaining app storage details via ADB

Question

TL;DR:

On-device, we can navigate to Settings › Apps, and for each app separately can call up details on storage used: by the app itself, by its data, by its cache. Is it possible to obtain those details from the command line, ideally via ADB – and without having root access?

In detail:

I've already searched the web, but found no information on this. I've already tried walking the package list (pm list packages), obtaining the path to the APK file (adb shell pm path $pkgname | awk -F':' '{print $2}'), and getting the file size of that (adb shell stat $path | grep Size) – but that has a series of disadvantages:

• it only gives me the size of the APK (for updated system apps, only of the latest update)
• even if scripted, it takes ~2s per app to obtain even that. As today's devices already ship with far more than 100 system apps, it would take "ages" even if only a few user apps were installed (almost 6 minutes on an almost virgin Wiko Sunny 3 where I just tried that)
• details on data and cache are completely missing

Ideally, Android has already somewhere collected those details; it doesn't take that long via the GUI. Maybe there's some database one could query without having root privileges – or some XML to parse, or some shell command I missed?

PS: if you know about a root-only solution, that'd be "better than nothing". Please indicate that in a comment then so I can come back and ask you to make that an answer if there are no non-root solutions.

Answer 1

My first instinct to dig out such information which is often available via programming route is to go through dumps of various system services. One such service is diskstats whose only purpose is to dump the status of the disk. Looking into the java code of DiskStatsService.java for various Android releases, I noticed that the information you are looking for is available since Android Oreo. Among other things, the dump shows all the package names, their package sizes, their app data size, and their cache sizes. That information is also dumped into the file /data/system/diskstats_cache.json but this file cannot be accessed without root access though.

The dump is pretty ugly so I wrote a bash script to show data neatly. Run this script in your Linux.

Here's the script (and it does not require root access too):

#!/bin/bash

USRDIR="$HOME"
F_DISK_STATS="$USRDIR"/diskstats.txt
F_PKG_NAMES="$USRDIR"/package_names.txt
F_PKG_SIZE="$USRDIR"/app_pkg_sizes.txt
F_DAT_SIZE="$USRDIR"/app_data_sizes.txt
F_CACHE_SIZE="$USRDIR"/app_cache_sizes.txt

# ADVISE: do a check whether ADB is working fine or not
adb shell dumpsys diskstats > "$F_DISK_STATS"

# Separating data into relevant named files
sed -n '/Package Names:/p' "$F_DISK_STATS" | sed -e 's/,/\n/g' -e 's/"//g' -e 's/.*\[//g' -e 's/\].*//g' > "$F_PKG_NAMES"
sed -n '/App Sizes:/p' "$F_DISK_STATS" | sed -e 's/,/\n/g' -e 's/.*\[//g' -e 's/\].*//g' > "$F_PKG_SIZE"
sed -n '/App Data Sizes:/p' "$F_DISK_STATS" | sed -e 's/,/\n/g' -e 's/.*\[//g' -e 's/\].*//g' > "$F_DAT_SIZE"
sed -n '/Cache Sizes:/p' "$F_DISK_STATS" | sed -e 's/,/\n/g' -e 's/.*\[//g' -e 's/\].*//g' > "$F_CACHE_SIZE"

# Printing package names and their sizes 
ttl_apps=$(wc -l "$F_PKG_NAMES" | cut -d ' ' -f1)
count=1
while [ $count -le $ttl_apps ]; do 
    pkg=$(sed -n "${count}p" "$F_PKG_NAMES")
    pkg_size=$(sed -n "${count}p" "$F_PKG_SIZE") 
    dat_size=$(sed -n "${count}p" "$F_DAT_SIZE")
    csh_size=$(sed -n "${count}p" "$F_CACHE_SIZE")
    echo -e "Pkg Name: $pkg" 
    echo -e "\t Pkg_size=$pkg_size bytes" 
    echo -e "\t Data_size=$dat_size bytes" 
    echo -e "\t Cache_size=$csh_size bytes" 
    echo -e "\t Total_size=$(($pkg_size + $dat_size + $csh_size)) bytes\n"
    count=$(( $count + 1)); 
done

Output when tested on OnePlus 6 (Android 9):

Pkg Name: org.xbmc.kodi
     Pkg_size=144297984 bytes
     Data_size=55771136 bytes
     Cache_size=54341632 bytes
     Total_size=254410752 bytes

Pkg Name: rikka.appops
     Pkg_size=10330112 bytes
     Data_size=1740800 bytes
     Cache_size=163840 bytes
     Total_size=12234752 bytes

Pkg Name: com.a0soft.gphone.aSpotCat
     Pkg_size=16228352 bytes
     Data_size=1101824 bytes
     Cache_size=163840 bytes
     Total_size=17494016 bytes

Answer 2

I've written a Python version. (Mainly intended for cases when you need to further work with the data.)

It works on its own as well. Without arguments, prints a table of all apps; you can only print some apps by providing their names as arguments.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

from subprocess import run, PIPE, DEVNULL
from json import loads

def get_appdata():
    output = run(['adb','shell','dumpsys','diskstats'], stdout=PIPE, stderr=DEVNULL, check=True, text=True).stdout
    datapoints = {
        'Package Names': 'name',
        'App Sizes': 'size',
        'App Data Sizes': 'data',
        'Cache Sizes': 'cache',
    }

    _data = {}

    for line in output.splitlines():
        for prefix, dataname in datapoints.items():
            if line.startswith(prefix + ': '):
                _data[dataname] = loads(line[len(prefix)+2:])

    for name, dataname in datapoints.items():
        if dataname not in _data:
            raise ValueError(f'dumpsys returned invalid output: missing `{name}:` line')


    assert len({len(x) for x in _data.values()}) == 1, 'dumpsys returned invalid output: unequal length of data fields'

    data = {}
    for i, app in enumerate(_data['name']):
        data[app] = {}
        for dp in ['size', 'data', 'cache']:
            data[app][dp] = _data[dp][i]

    return data

def show_table(appdata, apps=None):
    cwidth = max(len(x) for x in appdata.keys())

    print('{0:<{1}}'.format('App', cwidth), '         App', '        Data', '       Cache')
    for app, sizes in appdata.items():
        if apps is None or app in apps:
            print(f'{app:<{cwidth}} {sizes["size"]:>12} {sizes["data"]:>12} {sizes["cache"]:>12}')


if __name__ == '__main__':
    import sys
    appdata = get_appdata()
    if len(sys.argv) == 1:
        show_table(appdata)
    else:
        show_table(appdata, sys.argv[1:])

(Feel free to use and adapt. Hereby released to the Public Domain.)