What to do if Android Studio cannot see your device

When you run an app, Android Studio shows you the list of connected Android devices and running Android Virtual Devices. Occasionally, you won’t see the correct devices listed. Why is this?

It’s because Android Studio keeps track of which devices are available by talking to the Android Debug Bridge (abd). Sometimes the adb process dies, or gets confused. That means that Android Studio will lose contact with all available Android devices.

To fix this problem, open the command prompt or terminal and kill the server:

adb kill-server
adb devices

This will kill the server process, and then by asking to list the devices it will restart it and confirm that it is working.

Don’t forget, to do this you will need the adb command on your PATH. You can find it in the SDK tools directory. On a Mac this will be in the ~/Library/Android/sdk/tools directory.