Skip to main content

Android Tip : ADB couldn't find device interface error

Android Tip : Adb couldn't find device interface error

I recently faced this error during my development and wanted to share with you all what I learned while debugging this.

First of all, I’d take this blog post as an opporutnity to share with you briefly on how adb works.

There are three major components :

  1. Adb Client : It’s a client that runs on your development machine and is used to send commands to your device
  2. Adb deamon : It’s a process that runs on your device/emulator. It’s responsible for receiving the commands that you issue via adb client and execute them in a new thread/process.
  3. Adb server : This process runs on your host machine and manages communication between your adb client and adb process on the device.

The adb server runs on port 5037 (by default) and listens for commands that you issue via your adb client. As stated in the docs, the server then sets up connections to all running devices. It locates emulators by scanning odd-numbered ports in the range 5555 to 5585, the range used by the first 16 emulators. Where the server finds an adb daemon (adbd), it sets up a connection to that port.

Now, let’s talk about the error :

couldn’t find device interface

It came after running adb devices.

Looking at the full output, I noticed that it’s coming from the usb_osx.cpp file located here. It says that it can’t open the usb port.

Restarting the adb server or my mac didn’t help.

After searching around a bit, I found the most probable reason - maybe another process was occupying that port. That was mostly it, I realised that it was done by another tethering app that I was using.

After uninstalling that app, finally I was able to see my device in adb devices.

Hope it helps people out there.

Feel free to reach out in case of any doubts.


Labels:
Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Android : AbsSavedState cannot be cast to $SavedState

Android AbsSavedState cannot be cast to $SavedState I came across a strange crash today. This is the stacktrace : Fatal Exception: java.lang.ClassCastException: android.view.AbsSavedState$1 cannot be cast to android.widget.ScrollView$SavedState at android.widget.ScrollView.onRestoreInstanceState(ScrollView.java:1810) at android.view.View.dispatchRestoreInstanceState(View.java:14768) at android.view.ViewGroup.dispatchRestoreInstanceState(ViewGroup.java:3123) at android.view.View.restoreHierarchyState(View.java:14746) at android.support.v4.app.Fragment.restoreViewState(SourceFile:470) at android.support.v4.app.FragmentManagerImpl.moveToState(SourceFile:1326) at android.support.v4.app.FragmentManagerImpl.moveFragmentsToInvisible(SourceFile:2323) at android.support.v4.app.FragmentManagerImpl.executeOpsTogether(SourceFile:2136) at android.support.v4.app.FragmentManagerImpl.optimizeAndExecuteOps(SourceFile:2092) at androi...
2 comments
Read more

Android Tip : Handling back button in Fragments

Android Tip : Handling hardware back button in Fragment and DialogFragment This post explains how to handle hardware back button in a Fragment OR DialogFragment . In DialogFragment, it’s quiet straight forward to achieve this. You’ve to get the dialog instance and set onKeyListener on it : if (getDialog() != null ) { getDialog().setOnKeyListener( new DialogInterface.OnKeyListener() { @Override public boolean onKey (DialogInterface dialog, int keyCode, KeyEvent event) { if (event.getAction() == KeyEvent.ACTION_UP && keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_BACK) { Timber.i( "hardware back button pressed" ); } } }); } This can be done in the onViewCreated callback. For fragments, this method doesn’t work and fragments doesn’t have a direct callback to catch this event. So in this case, the approach that we follow is : You...
Post a Comment
Read more

Android Material Showcase View - Part 1

In this series, I'll be talking about a library which is used by a lot of android developers for showcasing their in-app content,  MaterialShowcaseView . I used this library sometime back for my work and had to modify it to fit my needs. In this process, I ended up digging it a lot and would like to share what I learned. The original library offers a fix set of features, which are demonstrated by the screenshots in the README. Let's jump on the technicalities right away. The original library offers two things : 1) highlighting a view ( see the README to know what I mean by highlighting here) 2) showing a content box that tells user what the highlighted view is about. Here's how it does this : The library adds a direct view child ( this class ) in the window decor view, so that it's drawn on top of your activity's view ( here ). Then, for drawing the overlay and highlighting our view, it overrides the `onDraw()` method of this view and uses android...
Post a Comment
Read more