How do I flash an Android ROM using my M1 Mac onto an old Android tablet?

Question

I want to flash Android ROMs onto old Samsung tablets (Android 4.4) which Samsung hasn't allowed to be updated past Android 4.4.

The issue is that I have an M1 Mac.

I tried:

• https://flash.android.com/ - it won't detect anything connected.
• Developer Options -> Allow USB debugging
• Power+Vol Down+Home to get into "ADB download" and "odin" modes.
• Downloading "platform-tools" (ADB) which refuses to detect anything after ./adb devices
• Restarting, rebooting, turning on and off again.

Nothing worked.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, you can't do this operation on your M1 device. Because, Android doesn't officially support the ARM version of SDK Platform tools. Only the intel version of Apple devices could be used to flash roms.

You should check this site, will see only the intel version of Mac supported in download page.

Answer 2

You can now go here to download official universal binaries from Google.

After downloading and unzipping, you run these commants in Terminal (modify "~/Downloads/platform-tools/" to match the folder you unzip to if it's different.)

mkdir ~/.android-sdk-macosx
mv ~/Downloads/platform-tools/ ~/.android-sdk-macosx/platform-tools
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:~/.android-sdk-macosx/platform-tools/' >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile

After that you can run adb, as likely documented where you got the ROM you're trying to install.