I want to be able to discover Android devices on my network and possibly retrieve some device information about them.  This is very easy with Apple devices since they run Bonjour services.  However, I can&#39;t seem to find any similar service running on Android.  

This must work without modifying the Android device, installing some service, or opening some port.  It&#39;s meant to work with vanilla Android devices in the way that Bonjour helps you find vanilla Apple devices.  Even being able to just verify that the device is running Android would be sufficient.

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**Chosen Answer**:  Although it&#39;s not the top rated answer (yet), please take a look at the response by Luis.  As he mentions, you can use a DNS lookup (using your local DNS server) to discover Android devices.  I have found this to have a 100% success rate, as Android forces devices to use a hostname of android-___________.  This is apparently difficult to change on the phone, even if it is rooted.  So I think this is a pretty accurate method.  Thanks, Luis!

    Example:
    $ nslookup 192.168.1.104 192.168.1.1
    Server:		192.168.1.1
    Address:	192.168.1.1#53

    104.1.168.192.in-addr.arpa	name = android-711c129e251f14cf.\001.

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**Sample Code:** If you wanted to implement this in Java (e.g., to run on Android), you can&#39;t easily use getHostName() because it uses the external DNS servers.  You want to use the local DNS server on your router, for example.  Luis mentions below that you could modify the DNS servers of the Wifi connection, but that could possibly break other things.  Instead, I&#39;ve found the `dnsjava` library to be extremely helpful to send targeted DNS requests.  Here is some sample code using the library:

			String ipAddress = &quot;104.1.168.192&quot;;
		    String dnsblDomain = &quot;in-addr.arpa&quot;;
            Record[] records;
		    Lookup lookup = new Lookup(ipAddress + &quot;.&quot; + dnsblDomain, Type.PTR);
		    SimpleResolver resolver = new SimpleResolver();
			resolver.setAddress(InetAddress.getByName(&quot;192.168.1.1&quot;));
			lookup.setResolver(resolver);
			records = lookup.run();
			
			if(lookup.getResult() == Lookup.SUCCESSFUL) {
			      for (int i = 0; i &lt; records.length; i++) {
			        if(records[i] instanceof PTRRecord) {
			          PTRRecord ptr = (PTRRecord) records[i];
			          System.out.println(&quot;DNS Record: &quot; + records[0].rdataToString());
			        }
			      }
			} else {
				System.out.println(&quot;Failed lookup&quot;);
			}
			
		} catch(Exception e) { 
			System.out.println(&quot;Exception: &quot; + e);
		}

This gives me the output:

    DNS Record: android-711c129e251f14cf.\001.

Bingo.

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any way to discover Android devices on your network?