Move app to phone

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.