Debugging a third party app on an android smartphone - android

Since a few days an installed app on my smartphone is crashing. Now I am wondering if there is a way to debug an app on my smartphone not created by me. I just have the apk file, not the actual code so I guess I'm not able to run it from android studio on my device. (The debuggable flag is not set so it is false if that is important). I know I can install the apk on emulator devices but the app is running on them without problems so I need to now the problem with my smartphone in particular.
Or maybe it's possible to get at least a log file with more information to the crash from my smartphone? I already found some apps that claimed they could do but that didn't work. Does anybody have a device to my situation?

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Xamarin mobile app deployment to phone not working outside of debug

I created a simple Xamarin ANDROID App. I set up my phone to development mode and deployed my app to the phone via USB.
The app continues to work on the phone as a regular app.
I then created a Xamarin MOBILE App which was more complex. I deployed it to my android phone via Visual Studio debug mode as with my previous app and it ran perfectly. But when I attempt to run the app directly from my phone, it won’t run. The first screen partially loads without anything on it and then disappears. My phone puts a message up saying that my app keeps stopping and would I like to close the app. I make use of a file placed in Assets. Might this be an issue when not debugging from the computer?
Might there be a difference between deploying a xamarin android app and a xamarin mobile app.
A minor thing is that it has added the name ‘.droid’ to the name of my app which I would like to get rid of.
I am new to deploying apps to a phone
I have solved it thanks to your helpful prompts.
I looked at the error logs and the error was ‘FATAL’ in a mono dll. This was indirectly helpful in that I knew it wasn’t the logic in my code.
I also made the discovery that running my app directly in the emulator also failed in the same manner as on my phone. I also ruled out that it might be an issue with transferring an asset -a file the my app uses- as I bypassed using the asset.
(Running my app via visual studio in both the emulator and my phone worked perfectly.)
I then decided to re-house my forms and classes in a new template as I suspected it was corruption in some xml configuration setting that didn’t bother Visual Studio. This worked great and the app now runs stand alone on the phone (and emulator).

Another way to debug an android app

I want to debug my android application, I have Eclipse Installed fully setup for android developement.
The problem is,
1) I can't run android emulator(Hardware Concerns).
2) I can't attach phone to my computer(Driver Concerns).
Now,
Is there a way to get debug functionality by putting directly the apk into the phone storage and installing it from there.
I wanted get the logcat of the application that I'll be running.
Basically I'm quite naive in android, I'm not quite sure of the terms I said but, What I want is a way to test my app on my phone without the role of my PC.
If you have root you can use Wifi ADB
Also you can remove drivers for this device and install other driver from your device manufacturer.
If you can run standard emulator you can use Genymotion.

Getting app logs off of a Samsung Galaxy S6

I do testing on app that I download from Jenkins as a .apk file. I have Android Studio and I have gotten as far as connecting my Samsung galaxy S6, setting it to debugging mode and I can see a bunch of device logs coming up at the bottom of my Android Studio screen.
What I cannot figure out is how to see the logs for the app I am testing. I have tried to filter the logs by using the app name. Do I need to filter the logs using a specific file name? Maybe the file used to install the app? Is there an easy way to get the app logs from my device that I am not seeing?
You need to ensure that:
This is the debug version of the app.
Proguard isn't set up to strip out certain logs.
ADB Integration is enabled.
Sometimes, you have cycle through the USB options (For example, my LG phone needed to be in PTP mode before Android Studio picked it up)
For obvious security reasons, most apps don't want the public to access their logs.

Wear app only work on debug

I'm developing a application to wearable devices, and I had all working perfectly while i'm in debug mode using Android Studio and Wear emulator and also a real Wear device.
I can comunicate Wear->Handheld and Handheld->Wear, send data, messages and all, i can package the two apk's in one and both apk's gets installed on each device.
The problem is that only works while debuging, if I stop debuging and open the app on Wear the app seems to start but it remains thinking and 1 minute later appears the clock screen and all went to normal.
I think that it has to be something about the comunication about wear->handheld, but i don't understand how can work on debugg and not on release.
Someone had those kind of problems or know the differences about debug and release regarding the comunication between devices?

Why would Android 2.2 reboot after install of an .apk file?

I am getting reports from beta testers that after installing my .apk file their device is rebooting. After reboot the application operates as normal. Reboot after installation is not part of the desired/expected behavior, and itself sounds like a security breach.
Can anyone speculate as to why Android might reboot after an .apk install?
UPDATE:
One of the devices was an LG Ally, the other was a Samsung Galaxy Note
Are your Beta users using a rooted device? Do they have some kind of security app like "Lookout" installed on their device?
I'd suggest that you make your app create a trace log on the sdcard, that you'd get your beta tester to email to you.
Of course, this debugging process would be easier if someone loaned you the same model of the device your beta user is using.
No matter what your app should never be able to crash the operating system. A lot of this can depend on the device and manufacturer. For example, I noticed that when using a certain app to stream music on 2.3.x on the Droid X, the device would sometimes restart. I could not fix this issue myself but instead had to wait until a fix was provided by Motorola (which it eventually was). I would see if you can find a common occurrence on certain devices or manufacturers then do some researching on their reported bugs page. Also, what type of application is this (game/media/utility?)

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