Testing your application without a mobile device

This article will show you how to install your application onto the Android emulator using the Android Debug Bridge (ADB).

The first step is to download your Android Package (APK) file. Andromo will email you a link to your APK file after you have successfully built your application. Simply click on the link and save the file somewhere on your hard drive.

In order to use the ADB you must download and install the Android SDK. Installations instructions are available on the Android Developer website. Once everything is installed you will need to start the Android emulator.

The final step is to use the ADB to install the APK file that you downloaded, from your computer onto the emulator. You will do this via the command line, so on Windows you will need to launch the command prompt, and on OS X or Linux you will need to launch your terminal. There you will be able to instruct the ADB to install your APK via the following command:

<<pathto>>/adb install <<pathto>>/MyApp.apk

For example on Windows you will first need to launch the command prompt by clicking the start button, typing 'cmd' into the Start Search field, and then hitting Enter on your keyboard:

More information on how to launch the command prompt can be found on Microsoft's website.

Now that we have the command prompt started we need to launch the ADB and install the APK onto the emulator. To do this we use the install command detailed above. For my application this is what my command looked like:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk-windows\platform-
tools\adb.exe" install "C:\Users\markmruss\Downloads\app_85_2.apk"