The emulators, which are provided by the Android development team and integrated in Xamarin, are great pieces of technology but do have some limitations. For example, in the previous chapter, we saw that they don't support most of the hardware interactions, such as NFC, GPS, or Accelerometer. Consequently, some of your applications will have to be developed and tested on real devices.
To follow this recipe you will, obviously, need an Android phone and a USB cable to connect it to your PC/MAC.
To get started with debugging on a phone, you'll need to perform the following steps:
- Enable the Debugging on Device feature of your Phone. On Android 4.0 and 4.1, it's under Setting | Developer Options | USB Debugging. Starting with Android 4.2, the developer option is hidden and you have to activate it by pressing seven time on the build number by navigating to Settings | About phone.
- On Windows, you need to install the USB Driver by executing the
android.batfile located in thetoolsfolder of your Android SDK installation. - Download and install the USB driver made by your phone manufacturer as explained at: http://developer.android.com/tools/extras/oem-usb.html#Drivers.
- Your phone should now be recognized by Xamarin and you can run, test, and debug your application directly on it.
The processes involved in debugging on an emulator or a physical phone are exactly the same.
Go to http://www.learn2crack.com/2014/07/adb-android-debug-bridge-over-wifi.html to learn how to debug over Wi-Fi instead of USB.