She opened Device Manager. The Pixel showed as “Unknown USB Device.” She right-clicked → Update Driver → Browse my computer → Let me pick from a list → Android Device → Google USB Driver (from the SDK extras\google\usb_driver folder). Windows complained about digital signatures. She rebooted into “Disable Driver Signature Enforcement” (holding Shift while clicking Restart → Troubleshoot → Advanced Startup → Startup Settings → Restart → press 7).
She plugged in her test device—a battered Pixel 4a. Windows chimed. Device showed up in File Explorer. But adb devices returned an empty list. android sdk on windows
Solution: enable long paths in Windows Registry. reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem" /v LongPathsEnabled /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f She opened Device Manager
Green. SUCCESS in 2m 34s. At 3:18 AM, she installed app-debug.apk on the Pixel via adb install . The app opened. The compass needle spun. The ambient noise meter flickered. Device showed up in File Explorer
She ran ./gradlew assembleDebug in her project folder. The build failed—not because of her code, but because Windows’ path length limitation (260 characters) was truncating a dependency’s file name deep inside C:\Users\Sarah\.gradle\caches\ .