So here's what I've figured out.
- .inf files are just part of a windows driver; they're a text file that describes what things the kernel should map to what things in the .cat or the .dll or whatever.
- Sony gave me only a .inf. They expected you'd supply the rest of the driver.
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- If I had the driver installed, Windows might be able to patch the new .inf into it.
- However, it fails with "cannot find the file specified" because although I have *a* Android driver, I don't have whatever specific 2010 driver Sony's inf was written *against*.
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- So what I need to make the inf work is to either locate Sony's old 2010 driver (by GUID?) or, more likely, figure out what lines in Sony's inf are the important ones and graft them into the driver I *do* have. That sounds... doable.
But then I get to the Even More Cursed part.
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I have *two* android_winusb drivers installed. 4d7eed is for my Oculus Quest; it's Android, but it's probably not the one Android phones are using, so I can ignore that.
7036ed8 is the one I *think* the phone is using. It's...
"LeMobile"?!
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The Android driver is *supposed* to list Android's manufacturer as Google. Instead, the manufacturer is "LeMobile". I cannot figure out what "LeMobile" is. I assumed it's some French cell provider, but I find no evidence such a company has ever existed in any country.
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Googling "lemobile android", I find multitudes trying to figure out where this "le mobile" driver came from, and claims of it breaking their phone/bootloader. I guess at some point this became the "newest" Android driver in Windows Update, and Microsoft installs it for everything
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Replying to
They left the Nexus and Pixel vendor ids in their driver when they forked the code so if you ever plugged in one of those and installed optional updates from Windows Update it would have given you this. It works fine but it's an older version of the proper adb/fastboot driver.
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Thanks. Is this the source for the newest/normalest driver?
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Yes, but it's a trivial driver and the one Windows Update gives you should work fine anyway. I think there are other drivers with the same vendor ids but for some reason Windows Update almost always prefers to find the LeMobile one. I don't know why Windows drivers are like this.
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I guess the LeMobile one ends up sorting first and is what it feels like giving out to people. Pretty sure they have several other drivers from vendors who made the same mistake and then maybe the official Google one too but I've never seen Windows Update actually serve that one.
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The Google variant is meant for Nexus/Pixel phones though so unless another device copied their USB vendor/device ids it won't do anything with it. There's literally just no special driver at all on macOS and Linux. adb and fastboot just use generic USB driver. Much simpler.
Since the other vendors tend to forget to remove the Nexus/Pixel vendor ids, you can use a bunch of different variants with Nexus/Pixel devices. I don't get why Microsoft doesn't validate this kind of thing somehow. I'm sure it happens with others things too. It's just weird.
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The impression I'm getting is that these drivers all basically work on all devices *except* when the device goes into Fastboot, at which point every device is its own special magical snowflake that wants its own special .inf file. I saw this with both the Xperia and with ZTE
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