Android USB debugging in VirtualBox

Brian, one workaround you might consider is to make your VM host an ADB host as well. Then you can just connect your VM client to it over TCP / IP. Here's the general idea for that setup:

1. Install the Android SDK on the host machine. You should only require the platform-tools package which includes adb.
2. Don't allow your VM client to take ownership of the Android device, so disable any VirtualBox USB filter rules you have and it also wouldn't hurt to then detach and reattach the device.
3. From your VM client, run adb kill-server. Make it a tskill adb for certainty. If you have any running instances of Eclipse, you'll want to shut those down first because it'll actually launch adb in the background. Don't skip this step.

4. From the host, execute adb devices. If all goes well (and it should), you'll see your device listed. It should look something like this (note the port number and sorry for the mangling):

   * daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 ** daemon started successfully *List of devices attached015d2994ed200409    device

At this point, your host should have an ADB server running at port 5037. You can check this from the VM client by running telnet 10.0.2.2 5037, where 10.0.2.2 is the default IP for VirtualBox hosts and 5037 is the default ADB port noted above.

1. Now you must either forward the ports from your host to your VM client, or otherwise connect ADB directly to your host IP:port. If you're like me, you'll find the ADBHOST and ANDROID_ADB_SERVER_PORT variables to be poorly documented and easy to screw up. For this reason, consider simple port fowarding over ssh (maybe via Cygwin) like so from the VM client:

   autossh -nNL5037:localhost:5037 -oExitOnForwardFailure=yes 10.0.2.2

2. Finally, run adb devices from your VM client. If you see "daemon not running," it means your port fowarding is screwed up. Otherwise you should see your device and be able to logcat all day. One noteworthy point is that you won't have an adb daemon running on your VM client, except for when you're actually using the debug bridge, of course.

I've used a similar mechanism for debugging devices over the network that are connected to remote machines and it worked well.

Not sure what has changed in VirtualBox since the question was posted, but selecting the usb device from VirtualBox menu Devices -> USB -> DeviceName worked seamlessly. I am working on VirtualBox 5.1.2 r108956.

I was also having trouble with ADB running over VM. I had a Windows 10 host and an Ubuntu 14.04 client. The autossh method did not work for me. I found an easier solution from another StackOverflow question. It requires that both your PC and your device are on the same WiFi network.

1. On your VM client run the following: adb tcpip 5555

   The device will disconnect from the VM because ADB is now in TCPmode instead of USB.

2. For the next part you need the IP address ofyour device. To find it, simply run adb shell ip -f inet addr show wlan0

3. Now you can connect to your device. On your VM client, run:

   adb connect <Device IP>:5555

From here all my adb shell, logcat, and monkey sessions ran without interruption!