yesterday I posted the question ‘How do I convert eclipse app for phone?’
I have used eclipse to design an android app which runs fine on the emulator and I now want to transfer it to my phone. Sixten Otto kindly offered some advice regarding how to test/debug my app on my phone straight from Eclipse's Run menu.
(See Developing on a Device from the Android developer site.)
Step 1, declare application as ‘debuggable’ – done, no problem.
Step 2, turn on USB debugging on phone – done, no problem.
Step 3, Setup your system to detect your device – been at this for
hours, still no closer to achieving. (And yes I do have the usb
driver in the Android sdk).
All I want to do is move my very simple app from my computer to my phone, for my own use only. I have Samsung Kies on my PC for file transfer and I have a load of files generated by eclipse. Surely there is a simple way of getting an app from PC to phone. Any help appreciated while I still have some hair left. Thanks.
On your Android device goto Settings/Applications and activate the checkbox "Unknown sources". Then open the folder of your Eclipse Android app project and you'll find the according apk file in the output folder.
You have then several possibilities to transfer this app to your Android powered device:
Install over Mail (simplest/fastest/minimum setup required)
Simply send the apk file to your own Gmail account to which you have also access from your mobile Android. Open it from there and the installation will automatically start.
Deploy on some publicly accessible URL
Alternatively you may have some hosting space somewhere. In such a case what you may do is to create a simple HTML page showing a "Download app" link which starts the download of your APK file (which you deployed on the server). To speed up a bit, you could use the Chrome-to-phone extension for pushing the page to your mobile, or you could create a QR code pointing to your deployed APK file and scan that from your mobile.
Although by having a FTP connection to your webspace you may be quite fast in deploying a new version of your app, this whole process is still quite tedious. Moreover it may not be granted that you have a webspace :)
Use Dropbox! (my favourite)
Personally my favorite one is to use Dropbox. It requires some setup steps, but Dropbox will be useful for a lot of other things too.
Get a Dropbox account and install it on your computer
Install Dropbox on your Android phone
Create a folder within your Dropbox folder for placing your apk file
Open Dropbox on Android and browse to the folder. Click on the apk file and the installation will start
This is nice once you have set up everything because you don't have to send emails back and forth. Moreover you have publicly accessible folders in Dropbox which allows you to share your app also with your friends (by sending the according URL).
I've taken this from a blog post I've written a couple of month ago.
Related
I am trying to open up an apk to test an app in development on an old Android phone, and it doesn't open it automatically after downloading to the device (it offers to open it in Chrome or HTML editor). Is there another way to open it (through an app etc.) or might I assume because the Android device is old the apk might not open it?
I ended up using AirDroid to download the apk via my computer and it worked beautifully!
I am total cordova beginner. I created a sample application that runs on my phone. It is a simple Test Database with 1 Customer Table. Eventually I will want to import data from a local file. It might not be necessary to know where my app is located on my phone in order to do the import. However, where is my app located on the phone? I am using a file browser that shows hidden files, and I can't seem to find the app. I can run the app as it has an icon on my phone. The name of the app is HTML5_2. It also is called com.coolappz.html5_2. But I can't locate it using the file browser on my phone. Does anybody know what the app path is on the android phone? Galaxy S5?
This question had been asked before but does not have any answers. Maybe this is just one of those wonders of the world that just works but nobody knows why?
Thanks.
Mike
If you use the config.xml of phonegap or cordova and read the documentation in the web you can see that in preferences you can pick the android-installLocation and select if internalOnly, auto or preferExternal. If you pick preferExternal, the app be install on the SD. More easy to see the complete rute and write the code.
You can see more of the App install location here
Regards and good code ;)
According to developer.android.com
http://developer.android.com/tools/publishing/publishing_overview.html#publishing-website
When users browse to the download link from their Android-powered
devices, the file is downloaded and Android system automatically
starts installing it on the device. However, the installation process
will start automatically only if the user has configured their
Settings to allow the installation of apps from unknown sources.
it seems to be possible to automatically start the install process without the user interaction. I've checked the box to allow apps from unknown sources, but I still have to manually trigger the install process. I saw many posts on the same topic which seems to suggest the opposite of what is said on the official website:
How to install APK automatically when the file download is complete (hosted on private)
how to automatically install an apk
How to automatically launch the Android installer after downloading the apk?
others seems to suggest that the only way to have the install process automatically happen is through an already installed app:
Android: install .apk programmatically
The requirement that I have is that the user only need to click on one single link on a private deployment website, and the application installation would be triggered automatically without the user having to do anything else.
Currently when I click on the link in my deployment website, all it does it downloads the apk file, I need to manually start the install process.
None of those answers really gets me what I need, the instructions on the official website would be perfect since it doesn't require anything else, except I couldn't get it to work, installing another custom app to install the original app would also have the same problem when trying to install it.
We are also deploying iOS apps for testing purposes internally, the way we are doing that is through the manifest file link
http://help.apple.com/iosdeployment-apps/mac/1.1/#app43ad871e
sample link from the page:
<a href="itms-services://?action=download-manifest&url=http://example.com/
manifest.plist">Install App</a>
Are there some extra steps that I have to do to get the instructions on the official android website to work? Maybe there is a way to get the download link to behave like an iOS manifest file link? Or perhaps there are some other ways to achieve my requirements?
Thanks.
The requirement that I have is that the user only need to click on one single link on a private deployment website, and the application installation would be triggered automatically without the user having to do anything else.
That is up to the implementation of the Web browser, not you. The Web browsers that I use download the APK via DownloadManager, then show a Notification when the download is complete, where tapping on that Notification drawer entry starts the install process. While there is nothing stopping a browser from automatically invoking the ACTION_VIEW or ACTION_PACKAGE_INSTALL Intent that starts the installation process, that is up to the authors of the browser.
Are there some extra steps that I have to do to get the instructions on the official android website to work?
Find some browser that works the way you want.
I am new to android application development.
I developed some android applications and i install the .apk files in client devices,these are working properly.
But my requirement is ,i have to make the client device ,to support for install the .apk file from my company only.If the client is try to install any outside .apk file,then it has to rise an error.
please help me to go forward.
thank you,
bye.
I guess its only possible, if u make changes in Android OS Source itself, there should be some java file, i guess this one which takes care of installation/uninstallation, blocking non market apps. just make a clear about it. Without which its not possible mostly.
save all the device ID into an xml file and bundle it with your application when application starts just get Device id and compare it with the list you have ,if the id match then start the application or show error
you cannot block other users to block installation but I think they wont be able to use the app or even open the application if you follow above procedure
I have developed a mobile application using jQuery Mobile. I have it working in the emulator using the default web browser engine. Now, I want to test the app using the different browsers engines available on mobile devices. I have seen this accomplished from other developers, such as Opera, Chrome, or Safari. What is happening is these different browsers are being pointed to the Android emulator that is running the application.
Can anyone provide a link on how this is accomplished so I may follow the steps? I have searched the net and I can seem to find any solid information that explains this well enough for me to follow.
Thank you for reading my post.
You can use the emulator to browse the web and go to websites with browser packages for you to install other apps in your virtual phone.
Alternatively you can use DDMS to transfer the .apk files to your virtual mobile phone, and then install them without using internet on emulator.
Then, when you have some application associated with a specific file type or operation, typically Android asks you which one you want to use, with a popup, and allows you to also set a default one for that file type/action.