Sometimes adb just refuses to recognize your connected device…

Here’s a quick & dirty solution for ya!

When you make a game for android in any of the game making tools, it’s always most comfortable to test the game on a real phone. Testing on a virtual device is OK when you are making an early prototype or a PoC. But when you want to see if the game (or some of it’s concepts) work, then you have to check it on a real device. And you have to check it often!

So. You make a small game,  you get yourself an android device, then you:

• turn USB debugging (By going to Settings->Applications->Development and checking “USB debugging” flag),
• download and install androd SDK (from this page: https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html),
• You connect your device and it gets recognized correctly by your system,
• You do the ultimate test of the setup by typing “adb devices” in the console, to list all the connected android devices, and you get this:

Fortunately, there is a quick and dirty fix for this problem, in 9 easy steps!

The images are from Polish language version of Windowa, sorry!
This instruction is for Windows 8, but it will probably work in Win10 too also as well. Let me know…

Step 1.

Download the adb USB driver from this location: https://developer.android.com/studio/run/win-usb.html

Step 2.

Press [Windows Key + R] to bring in the “Run” window and type in “devmgmt.msc” for the device manager to show up

Step 3.

Find your device on the devices list and right-click on it. Select “Update Driver Software…”

Step 4.

Select “Browse my computer for driver software…” option

Step 5.

Select “Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer” option

Step 6.

Select “Show all devices…” and click “Next”

Step 7.

Select “Have Disk…” option

Step 8.

In the file picker select file named “android_winusb.inf” that you have hopefully extracted by now from the file you downloaded in step 1.

Step 9.

On the device list select “Android ADB Interface” and click “Next”.

If prompted, say you still want to install these unsigned, very probably dangerous drivers.

Result

Windows will inform you that the drivers have been installed successfully:

And your device list should look like this:

And checking adb devices again gives this:

This d72d98b4 is an identifier of your device. ADB sees your device. What does it mean?