I have had issues connecting to the dev client through the terminal (pressing i or a after running npx expo start --dev-client, so now I just connect through the dev build itself.
If you open the dev build on your device you can either:
login to expo and then hit ‘Fetch Development Servers’ and then click on your app.
Choose ‘Enter url Manually’ and then enter the url that’s visible in your terminal after you start up the server