Android ADB reports device is “offline”

Device upgrades are so often a good-news-bad-news situation … and so was the case of my device’s upgrade to Android 4.2.2 over the weekend.

I love this latest version of Android – in addition to just generally being a good update, it also has a sweet new camera and, some cool new clock/stopwatch/timer features.

The new camera features are especially cool for me as I’m right in the midst of writing a new Android developer course Android Photo and Video Programming for Pluralsight.

But like so many exciting weekend events, Monday often comes with regret … and so it was today.

I fire up my favorite Android IDE (currently JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA), connect my device, then launch the debugger … and it’s then that I see “waiting for device” … I keep waiting, waiting, waiting.

To check things out, I do an ‘adb kill-server’ followed by an ‘adb devices’ and I see…

List of devices attached
99999C99999D999         offline

That’s something I don’t see too often so I do the standard stuff … reboot my desktop computer, reboot the device. Always the same result … the device reports being offline

The Answer….

I resolved the issue by upgrading to the latest version of the Android SDK Platform-tools – for me, that’s version 16.0.2:

Just something to remember … you may have to run the SDK Manager more than once to get all of the latest updates.

In my case, I had to…

• Run the SDK Manager
• Execute ‘Install packages…’
• Exit the SDK Manager
• Restart the SDK Manager
• Execute ‘Install packages…’

Only then did I get the necessary updates to resolve the offline issue so that I now see the much more familiar (and welcome) device message in ADB.

List of devices attached
99999C99999D999         device