Android Debugging

Overview

Android-specific evidence-gathering and investigation techniques on a root-cause-first foundation.

Root-cause-first foundation:

• No fix before the root cause is found. Investigate first — reproduce, gather evidence (observed values, not assumed), trace the cause. Patching a symptom you don't understand creates two bugs.
• Three failed guesses ⇒ stop and question the architecture rather than guessing again.

The Android-specific tools below serve that investigation. Optional: if you run a dedicated debugging-discipline skill (e.g. superpowers:systematic-debugging or ace:systematic-debugging), this layers on top of it — but it requires none.

Evidence-Gathering by Problem Type

Crashes & Exceptions

# Stream crash logs filtered by app package
adb logcat --pid=$(adb shell pidof -s com.example.app)