Tracing on Android Touch Devices

Tracing on Android Touch Devices

Tracing on Android touch devices is not as straightforward as on iPads because there is no browser inbuilt console.

There are a few tools to remote debug Webkit browsers. Here we are only going to cover the Android Debug Bridge – adb – which lets you output trace statements to a dos command prompt. To use adb you require:

• The platform tools included in the Android SDK package: http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html.  Note: the entire package is quite big, it should be enough to just get the platform tools.

• A USB connection to a PC or laptop. Check that your device has USB Debugging enabled: Settings – Applications – Development – USB debugging

To start using adb:

1.   Connect the device to the computer and open a DOS prompt and change directory to the platform tools.

2.   Type this command and press Enter:

3.   Type this command and press Enter:

4.   Type this command and press Enter:

If no devices are listed it probably means that the proper driver is missing. Otherwise you should see something like this:

5.    To start tracing, first clear the log:

6.    Next you can issue this command which will filter the browser messages:

From here on any trace messages will come out on the DOS window:

For more information about the adb interface see: http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/adb.html.