How can I deploy and execute an application on a device connected to a remote system?

by

From the adb tag wiki:

Android Debug Bridge (adb) is a versatile command line tool that lets
you communicate with an emulator instance or connected Android-powered
device. It is a client-server program that includes three components:

  1. A client, which runs on your development machine. You can invoke a client from a shell by issuing an adb command. Other Android tools such as the ADT plugin and DDMS also create adb clients.
  2. A server, which runs as a background process on your development machine. The server manages communication between the client and the adb daemon running on an emulator or device.
  3. A daemon, which runs as a background process on each emulator or device instance.

adb connect command is used to connect the local adb server with the adbd daemon on a network connected device. But what you want is to connect the local adb client to the remote (running on another system) adb server. The default behavior of the adb executable is to connect to the local instance of the adb server. If none found it would try to start one. This approach works great for most environments where all development is being done on a single system. But in more complicated environments it may result in multiple instances of adb server being launched. And because adbd daemon only supports being connected to a single adb server at a time – the device will get recognized by one system and will appear missing everywhere else.

So in order for adb to reliably recognize devices in those more complicated configurations you need to tell adb to stop guessing and manually specify which part of adb (i.e. server or client) should be running on which system.

First off make sure that you have the same and sufficiently recent version of adb (the latest Google official version usually works the best) installed on both local and remote systems. And that no adb servers are currently running on either system.

Then start an instance of the adb server on the remote system (the one which you will be plugging the devices into) with this command:

adb -a -P <PORT_NUMBER> nodaemon server

Now you can force adb client on the local system to use the other (remote) server instead of starting its own (local) instance by adding -H <REMOTE_IP> -P <PORT_NUMBER> to your adb commands:

adb -H <REMOTE_IP> -P <PORT_NUMBER> devices

Alternatively, setting ANDROID_ADB_SERVER_ADDRESS=<REMOTE_IP> and ANDROID_ADB_SERVER_PORT=<PORT_NUMBER> environment variables on the client side would allow you to avoid having to specify the <REMOTE_IP> and <PORT_NUMBER> for every adb command.

And if omitted the <PORT_NUMBER> would default to 5037.

This official built-in solution for adb orchestration is not a mutually exclusive alternative to the SSH tunneling – it just addresses another more important issue. You can add tunneling on top of this to add extra security or help with routing issues in a multi site network environment. But the tunneling alone will not be able to solve all the adb connectivity problems.

Same goes for the virtualized environments – running multiple adb server instances between host and guest systems will also result in the adb connectivity issues.

More Related Contents:

  1. INSTALL_FAILED_NO_MATCHING_ABIS when install apk
  2. Retrieve database or any other file from the Internal Storage using run-as
  3. How do I get an apk file from an Android device?
  4. ‘adb’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file
  5. Set up adb on Mac OS X
  6. How to make Android’s aapt and adb work on 64-bit Ubuntu without ia32-libs (works for versions 12, 13 and 14)
  7. Android ADB device offline, can’t issue commands
  8. Is it possible to execute adb commands through my android app?
  9. Why do I get a “sqlite3: not found” error on a rooted Nexus One when I try to open a database using the adb shell?
  10. Send data back to the script which started the activity via adb shell am start
  11. ADB No Devices Found
  12. Solving “adb server version doesn’t match this client” error [duplicate]
  13. Installing ADB on macOS [duplicate]
  14. ADB Install Fails With INSTALL_FAILED_TEST_ONLY
  15. Where to find info on Android’s “service call” shell command?
  16. Connecting to WiFi using adb shell
  17. Using adb logcat with a real phone (and not the emulator)
  18. adb server is out of date. killing [duplicate]
  19. INSTALL_FAILED_USER_RESTRICTED : android studio using redmi 4 device
  20. Android adb not found
  21. Android: adb pull file on desktop
  22. How to exclude certain messages by TAG name using Android adb logcat?
  23. adb connection by wifi getting killed when a new USB attached/detached
  24. Copying files in ADB shell with run-as
  25. Confused about testCompile and androidTestCompile in Android Gradle
  26. How to check database on not rooted android device
  27. adb devices command not working
  28. ADB is not recognizing my device
  29. Launch a script as root through ADB
  30. adb shell su works but adb root does not

Leave a Comment