The Infamous Server Didn’t ACK

The Android development environment is driven by the ADB daemon. We ran into an issue where the ADB server was failing to start. If you have run into this as well, follow the steps below to get it fixed!

The Error

1 adb start-server
2 * daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 *
3 ADB server didn't ACK
4 * failed to start daemon *

Debugging

The following command will essentially tell you why the ADB daemon is failing to initialize:

1 adb nodaemon server

The Fix(es)

Invalid content in adb_usb.ini. Quitting.
Delete the contents within your `adb_usb.ini` file

Unable to bind to tcp:5037
Kill the existing ADB process in memory