Chapter 13. Running mobile apps on physical devices
This chapter covers
- Setting up Android devices for debugging apps
- Signing Android apps
- Creating iOS provisioning profiles
- Debugging on iOS devices
In part 2 of this book we built two apps for iOS and Android using the MVMM design pattern. In this part, we’re going to look at how to take our apps from working code to production-ready apps released to the Apple App Store and Google Play store. We’ll start in this chapter by looking at how to sign our apps so that we can run them on real devices. Then, over the next three chapters, we’ll look at writing automated UI tests to validate that our apps work, look at using Visual Studio App Center to build our apps, run our UI tests in the cloud, monitor for crashes, and provide analytics to trace how how users are using our apps, and finish up by deploying to beta testers and the Google Play and Apple App stores.
So far, we’ve tested our apps by running them on Android emulators and iOS simulators. These virtual devices are good enough for simple testing purposes, but we really need to run our apps on physical devices—after all, the end goal is to have an app we can sell in the store to people using phones and tablets, not emulators and simulators.