Debugging on an Android device

Unity supports the following ways to debug an application on an Android device:

• USB debugging.
• Both wired and wireless connection through Android Debug Bridge.

USB debugging

Unity supports USB debugging for Android devices. To use USB debugging, enable developer options on your device. To do this, see Android’s Configure developer options documentation.

Use a USB cable to connect the device to your computer. If you are developing on a Windows computer, you might need to install a device-specific USB driver. See the manufacturer’s website for your device for additional information.

The setup process differs for Windows and macOS. For more information on connecting your Android device to the SDK, see the Run Your App section of the Android Developer documentation.

Note: Unity doesn’t support USB debugging for Chrome OS devices. Instead, use Android Debug Bridge over wireless connection.

Android Debug Bridge

Unity supports Android Debug Bridge (ADB) over USB for Android devices and over wireless connection for Android and Chrome OS devices. Wireless connection is useful when you can’t perform USB debugging, such as when using a Chrome OS device, when a controller is plugged into the Android device, or when debugging VR applications and you insert the Android device into the VR Kit.

To set up ADB:

• For Android, see Android Debug Bridge.
• For Chrome OS, see Debugging on a Chrome OS device.

View Android logs

When you run a build of your application on an Android device, Android collects messages such as stack traces and logs from scripts. To see these messages, Android provides the logcat command-line tool. To use this tool with your Unity application, either:

• Launch ADB with the logcat parameter:
  $ adb logcat
• Use the Android Logcat package which implements the logcat command-line tool and displays messages from the application in a dedicated window in Unity.

For more information, see Android Logcat.