Unable to connect to localhost from android device

Disclaimer : I am aware that there are a large number of similar-sounding questions to this one. But responses to those haven't helped me.

I have connected my android device to my development machine with a USB cable and I am running a server on my machine (ionic/cordova livereload and dev server.) This server is at port 8100 and the livereload is at 35729. When running the application with livereload turned on, the app did not run and was just a blank screen. I decided to hit the dev server through my phone's browser and I entered the IP address of the dev machine on the browser and the connection keeps timing out. Basically, I am just not able to connect localhost through my android device.

The following are things I have tried based on responses to a similar question :

1. Both the dev machine and device are on the same wifi.
2. I got the IP address of the dev machine by running an ipconfig command.

I am not sure why this is happening and I have spent precious hours trying to figure this out. Can anyone please help. I will be able to provide more information and update the question as requested.