"adbd cannot run as root in production builds" even though the 'debug' build variant is selected?

Question

I'm trying to point an Android emulator to a local VM, for which I need to adb root. However, I'm getting this error:

$ adb root
adbd cannot run as root in production builds

Yet the build variant I am running of the p2p-app is debug:

The build.gradle for the p2p-app module includes the following:

android {
    buildTypes {
        release {
            minifyEnabled true
            shrinkResources true
            proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android.txt'), 'proguard-rules.txt'
            debuggable false
            signingConfig signingConfigs.release
        }

        debug {
            testCoverageEnabled = true
            minifyEnabled false
            proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android.txt'), 'proguard-rules.txt'
            debuggable true
            versionNameSuffix '-' + gitBranchName()
            applicationIdSuffix '.fifa'
            ext.betaDistributionReleaseNotesFilePath = "fabric-changelog.txt"
            ext.betaDistributionGroupAliases = "android-engineers"

        }
    }
}

Since the debug variant has debuggable true, I would expect it to be possible to get root access to the emulator?

Answer 1

Following ADB root is not working on emulator, I managed to overcome this limitation by creating an emulator from a Google APIs system image, not a Google Play one (see screenshot below).

With this emulator I was able to adb root:

$ adb root
restarting adbd as root