All language subtitles for 2. Running the App on a Real Android Device

Thus far, we only tested our application on an Android emulator and that is generally fine of course,

Android is one of the major platforms you typically develop for but of course, you might also want to

test your app on an iOS simulator

if you are developing on a macOS system because you can only build iOS apps on macOS systems unfortunately

or maybe you don't want to test your application on an emulator only but also on a real device and we'll

have a look at all these other use cases or these other ways of running our application over the next

minutes.

So here's the Android emulator and I created it with the help of the AVD manager

as I showed earlier in the course, start it through Android Studio, you can open that AVD manager and

spin up your emulator there,

so that is what we already did.

How could we now launch this app on a real Android device though? For that, you first of all need to prepare

your Android device and

that means that you need to open your settings on your device and there, choose these developer options.

However, you might not have that option in your menu,

in this case, go to about phone and there, tap on that build number seven times.

Now that might look strange but this actually gives you this developer options menu item here,

so tap on that build number here seven times,

I already activated it, so that's why I get this message

and once you did this, you should have the developer options here.

Now there, generally make sure that it's turned on and then there's one specific option you need to

enable and that is USB debugging.

Make sure that USB debugging is switched on,

thereafter connect your device, your Android device with a USB cable to the machine you're working on,

so you you're developing this Flutter app on and now you should be able to boot that Flutter app onto

that device.

Now here actually in this Flutter app which I have here, I now can choose my device in the bottom right

corner, here in Visual Studio Code,

I now have the choice whether I want to use the emulator or my device here and in Android Studio, you would

also have an option of choosing where to boot it. If you're not sure how you can choose that,

you can always simply quit the emulator so that you only have the connected device as the only device

on which the app could be installed and run and then, the Flutter run command or running it with the

debug command here should automatically pick the connected device.

So here, I selected the connected device in the dropdown menu and with that, I can run the app

as I always run it,

so either with the Flutter run command or in Visual Studio Code, here with debug, start without debugging

or in debugging mode

but I will go without debugging since this is a bit faster and now the app will be built as it was before

and it will then be shipped onto the real device and will be installed and launched there so that you

can test it there.

Now let's wait for that to finish.

So here's the app running on my real device, on my real connected Android device and of course there,

I can interact with it just as I could in the emulator, which is good,

you should see the same result here.

Now when developing an app, testing it on real devices is really crucial and something you absolutely

have to do because whilst the emulators are really good and really emulate real devices, it's just

a simulation,

nothing can replace a real device.

So testing on a real device and if possible, on different real devices is something you should do as

part of every app development process.