Droid Explorer, at its root, depends heavily on the Android SDK. It communicates with your devices via ADB.
When Droid Explorer launches, it does some system checks to make sure the tools that it needs are accessible. These mainly include adb
and aapt
. There are some other tools that it uses, but these are the main ones that it needs to communicate.
There are 2 types of errors that can happen with the SDK not found:
Registry Error
If you see the following error message:
Unable to locate the SDK Version in 'HKLM\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\DroidExplorer\InstallPath'. Try reinstalling the application.
When you first install Droid Explorer, it will ask you for the location of your Android SDK. This value is stored in the Registry.
32bit:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\DroidExplorer\InstallPath
64bit:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\DroidExplorer\InstallPath
Under this location, you will see a value called SdkPath
. This needs to be the location of the root of your Android SDK.
- Make sure Droid Explorer is closed.
- Open Registry Editor
- WIN+R
- Type
regedit
- Press Enter
- Navigate to the location explained above
- Set the value of
SdkPath
to be the path to your sdk: My location is d:\android\android-sdk\
.
- Close the Registry Editor.
- Launch Droid Explorer
If you still are getting a registry SDK error after following these instructions, Ask a Question and add the droidexplorer tag.
File System Error
If you see the following error message:
Unable to locate the SDK tools. Try reinstalling the application.
This error usually happens when you install the Android SDK, but do not run the SDK Manager and add the required packages to the SDK.
As a rule of thumb, you should follow Step 1, at a minimum, for what packages should be added to the SDK.
Source
1. Get the latest SDK tools
As a minimum when setting up the Android
SDK, you should download the latest tools and Android platform:
Your SDK Manager should look something like this:

If you still are getting a file system SDK error after following these instructions, Ask a Question and add the droidexplorer tag.
Extra information about how Droid Explorer looks for these tools:
It will look in 3 places for each tool that it needs to use.
- [SdkPath]/tools/
- [SdkPath]/platform-tools/
- [SdkPath]/build-tools/[latest-version]/
Older versions of Droid explorer looked in [SdkPath]/platforms/[latest-version]/tools/
but this path is no longer valid in the SDK.
C:\Users[username]\AppData\Local\Android\sdk
– bgmCoder Apr 15 '16 at 20:57