I realize this question is really old, but I solved the problem slightly differently, and it took me a while to figure out this trivial solution. Note that the localhost in the ssh command refers to the local interface of the remote machine.Īdb devices showed a new emulator - emulator-5554 - and I could use it as if it were running on my local machine. I believe the emulator tries to notify a local adb server at startup hence the need to restart adb in order for it to probe the local 5554+ ports.

ssh -NL 5554:localhost:5554 -L 5555:localhost:5555 killall adb adb devices.

Each subsequent emulator takes the next available even+odd port number tuple (up to around 5580, I think).įor reference, I did the following steps on my local machine:

So you could probably get away with only forwarding port 5555 (though I've only tried it so far with both). The emulator listens on two TCP ports per instance: 5554 for the telnet interface and 5555 for control communication with tools like DDMS. I haven't previously tried (or even noticed) the adb connect command that cmb mentioned, but I can confirm that forwarding the TCP ports yourself - such as over SSH - works fine.

Debug android studio emulator