Avast antivirus has been known to cause this a lot with ADB where it locks the file in the virus chest.

Third-Party Antivirus - Antivirus softwares are known to cause several issues where they remove a file from your system due to a false positive.

However, do remember that the causes include but are not limited to the ones mentioned down below. To understand and establish a better understanding of the error message in question, let us discuss the different reasons the issue may arise in more detail.

In addition to that, your project settings can also cause this error message to pop up. Issues like these are pretty common with antivirus software and thus, while using one, you need to make sure that it isn’t triggering a false positive on the files that you are working with. This can happen due to several reasons including when your antivirus software removes the adb.exe file due to a false alarm. As it turns out, the error message appears when Android Studio is not able to locate the ADB.exe file that is located in the platform-tools folder. While trying to run your app via the Android Studio, you might face the “ Unable to Locate ADB” error message that stops the simulation. It can be used for various purposes as it facilitates a bunch of actions including installing and debugging apps on your device.

Android Debug Bridge or ADB allows you to communicate with your devices via a command-line interface.

Android studio unable to locate adb