Android ADB Device Will Not Stay Connected

Question

Recently all my devices have lost connection to adb ... kind of. I've searched all over but can't find this exact issue, so here goes.

The output of 'adb devices' is an empty list, about 95% of the time. If I'm spamming 'adb devices' I'll see an occasional:

List of devices attached 
<deviceId>        device

but it disappears less than a second afterwards. This happens with my Nexus 7, Nexus 5, and a non-Nexus Asus tablet. The symptoms are identical for all my devices and various USB cables.

Here's what I've tried, unsuccessfully:

1. adb kill-server, adb start-server
2. Other USB cables
3. Other USB ports (front, back, USB 2.0, USB 3.0)
4. Ensure udev rules are correct, restart udev
5. Other devices
6. reinstall kubuntu, reverting to 12.04 (from 14.04)
7. reset Android device to factory

The last steps were out of desperation. And here we are, #8: ask SO for help.

This all worked fine as of 2 days ago, before my upgrade to kubuntu 14.04, which is why I tried #6, assuming it would resolve my issue. It didn't. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I was able to resolve this by using the adb packaged with android-tools-adb. Why that works while the stock adb in platform-tools did not, I have no idea.