Meta Portal users are seeing a new ‘Unlock ADB’ prompt, but there’s a catch

Meta Portal owners are suddenly seeing a new on-screen message telling them they can unlock ADB on their devices, but there is a pretty obvious problem. The prompt says users should head to Settings > Debug > ADB Enabled, yet people on the main thread on Reddit say that menu simply is not there.

And no, this is not limited to one or two oddball units. According to reports in the same thread, the message has shown up on retail Portal hardware, including the first-gen Portal Plus, Portal Mini, Portal TV, and at least some other models, with several users pointing to firmware version 1.44.4 as the point where things started changing.

A second Reddit thread about Portal Go tells a similar story. One user on version 1.47.4 said the device showed the ADB-related prompt, but they still could not find any setting to actually turn it on.

From what I was able to deduce, this looks less like a proper feature launch and more like an unfinished rollout, or maybe even the wrong screen getting pushed to regular devices. The image being shared around clearly lays out a path for enabling ADB, but multiple users say tapping the build number does nothing, and the promised Debug section never appears.

That said, there’s one interesting thing to note.

In the Reddit discussion, one Portal Plus owner said that after updating to 1.44.4, the output from fastboot oem device-info started showing a new line reading “ADB allowed: false,” which apparently was not there before. That does not mean ADB is available, but it does suggest Meta may have changed something under the hood.

Portal owners have been waiting for exactly this kind of opening for a while now. Back in January, users on Reddit were openly asking Meta to unlock the bootloader or provide some kind of end-of-life escape hatch so the devices would not just slide into e-waste. That push picked up as Meta continued stripping features from Portal, including the Photos experience that many users treated as one of the device’s last useful functions, something we covered previously here.

There is also no sign, at least on paper, that Meta has publicly documented ADB support for Portal. The company still has a live Portal Help Center and a standard software update page, but nothing surfaced there about enabling ADB on consumer Portal devices.

So for now, Portal users are seeing the message, but not the switch that is supposed to go with it. And after years of features being quietly removed, you can see why some people are excited, while others think Meta may have pushed something it did not mean to.

As usual, we’ll keep an eye out for any further developments and will update the post accordingly.

Featured image credit: u/Ready2waswas / Reddit

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