Getting ADB access to the LG GW620 on MacOS

Fixed! I can now use ADB to talk to the phone in OSX! Turns out that it’s a problem with the way that LG designed the phone’s composite device vs the way that OSX recognizes composite devices. USB devices all present a class and a subclass to the OS when they’re plugged in. For composite devices the class is 0 and the subclass can be 0 (legacy) or 16(current.) Linux plays a little fast and loose, and assumes that anything with a class of 0 is a composite device, but OSX is a little more stringent. It looks for the subclass to be proper. LG made the subclass on the GW620 a 2. Not 0 or 16 like the USB spec says, but 2. Totally non-standard. So, I modified the Info.plist for OSX’s composite device driver so that it would also accept 2. Problem solved. 🙂 Here’s what you need to do to make it work:

1. Open terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
2. “cd /System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOUSBCompositeDriver.kext/Contents”
3. “sudo nano Info.plist” (or vi, or emacs, or whatever console editor you prefer)
4. Copy the IOUSBComposite section (from <key> to </dict>)
5. Paste the section in at line 66 (right after where it appears) so you have 2 copies in the file
6. Change the bDeviceSubClass value from 0 to 2
7. Change the key name from “IOUSBComposite” to “GW620”
8. The end result should look something like this:
   

                   <key>GW620</key>
                   <dict>
                           <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
                           <string>com.apple.driver.AppleUSBComposite</string>
                           <key>IOClass</key>
                           <string>IOUSBCompositeDriver</string>
                           <key>IOProviderClass</key>
                           <string>IOUSBDevice</string>
                           <key>bDeviceClass</key>
                           <integer>0</integer>
                           <key>bDeviceSubClass</key>
                           <integer>2</integer>
                   </dict>
   

9. “sudo diskutil repairpermissions /” and let it finish
10. “sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions” and wait a few mins for the extension reindexing to finish
11. “adb devices” should now see your phone

Note, this is VERY kludgy, and will probably break every time OSX updates itself, but it works. I can finally stop rebooting every time I want to work on the phone! 😀