I am not familiar with Android Things but hopefully this will point you in the right direction... I have had a lot of success using a USB to 485 converter and the minimalmodbus python library on a Raspberry Pi. See below for some example code that I have used in the past. It is pretty basic but should get you started.
import minimalmodbus
import serial
usbDevice = '/dev/ttyUSB0'
modbusSlaveID = 1
# can be 'ascii' or 'rtu'
modbusFormat = 'rtu'
registerToRead = 64
# 3 is for Holding Registers, 4 is for Input Registers
functionCode = 3
# initialize the device
device = minimalmodbus.Instrument(usbDevice, modbusSlaveID, modbusFormat)
# set the various options, which will depend on the device you are communicating with
device.debug = True
device.serial.baudrate = 9600
device.serial.bytesize = 8
device.serial.parity = serial.PARITY_NONE
device.serial.stopbits = 1
device.serial.timeout = 2 # seconds
print device.read_register(registerToRead, functioncode=functionCode)
p.s. This is my first Answer, hope I did it right...