

To view the logs of your device, connect your Android device to your laptop. Logcat is a command-line tool that dumps a log of system messages, including stack traces when the device throws an error and messages that you have written from your app with the Log class.

The Android SDK and Tools can be found here: Inside of that SDK is a very useful tool that can tell you exactly what your physical device is doing. When you are doing Android development you install the Android SDK’s that allow you to run the necessary emulators and build code on your laptop before pushing the code to the physical device. I did some research and found a very handy utility that you may not be aware of. This led me down the path of trying to find a way to see what the app was doing on the physical device after the install. We were unable to utilize the Visual Studio debugger to find out what was going because as I said before the application would run fine locally. However, when we ran the same build through the Azure pipeline and deployed the app to the same device via Microsoft App Center, the application would hang at startup.

When we were creating the build and running it locally, we were able to sign the build and install it via Visual Studio to a physical device and the application would run fine. When we got to the Android pipeline, we ran into a bit of a snag. Due to the specific requirements of each platform, it is necessary to configure separate pipelines for Android and iOS. On a recent engagement, I assisted one of our clients with configuring Azure DevOps pipelines for a cross platform Xamarin forms application.
