Use and purpose of Android.local

Question

Recently I was looking at the Android-Things SDK, and I have installed it on my Raspberry Pi device.

To connect Raspberry Pi with ADB I have used:

adb connect <ip address>:5555

But then I have found something like this:

adb connect Android.local

Reference

By searching lot of things on Google I have not found anything related to Android.local. Is there any documentation about this or not?

Answer 1

Raspberry Pi broadcasts the hostname Android.local over Multicast DNS. So, if your PC supports MDNS, you can config like this link.

And this is document for mDNS

Answer 2

Also on operating systems like Windows that doesn't support mDNS out of the box you can install the Bonjour Service developed by Apple. The Bonjour Service provides a new command line tool for mDNS requests called dns-sd. Execute the following command to search for your Android Things device:

dns-sd -Q Android.local

The tool doesn't terminate and will continuously print out all devices with the passed FQDN. I connected my Raspberry Pi over Ethernet and WiFi. Because of that I get two addresses:

Timestamp     A/R Flags if Name                             T   C Rdata
22:18:47.771  Add     2 13 Android.local.                   1   1 192.168.x.123
22:18:51.247  Add     2 13 Android.local.                   1   1 192.168.x.124

Also changes will be tracked like a link down of my WiFi connection:

22:19:52.940  Rmv     0 13 Android.local.                   1   1 192.168.x.124

Answer 3

Though above answer deliver the proper knowledge, I would like to add some cherry on the cake.

• The Raspberry PI Automatically broadcasts Android.local and should resolve to the IP address assigned to your Pi on port 5555. Running the following:

adb connect Android.local

• For years the ".local" domain seemed to be a sane choice for local networks running on private (RFC 1918) IP addresses. Today we learned that ".local" is nowadays used for zeroconf network services.

• As per Wikipedia ...Networking device hostnames ending with .local are often employed in private networks. ->Using the .local label for the full DNS name for the internal domain is a more secure configuration because the .local label is not registered for use on the Internet. This separates your internal domain from your public Internet domain name.

-Hope it helps Thanks in advance.!~!