There are a couple of things I have found to be very useful while developing android applications. In my recent interactions with the android brethren, I noticed that a majority of them haven’t heard of these tools or didn’t know its true potential. Here, I am listing them out, so that you can benefit from it too.
1] ADB WiFi
Allows you to connect your android device over wifi. This is a nifty little utility that comes to your rescue in case you have forgotten your ‘cable’ at home. This is also useful if you don’t like the tangled mess of cables on your desk. Simply connect your device and laptop to the same WiFi network and start the app. Once connected, you won’t notice the difference. This also reduces the amount of time your device is physically connected to the PC, which can otherwise cause your battery to degrade very quickly. The app requires your phone to be rooted, but what the heck, you are an android developer and you must have rooted the phone already. There are a number of variants of this app on Play Store.
ADB Wifi on Play Store
2] AirDroid
If you are an android developer, you must have heard of AirDroid. It is one of the top utility applications on the play store. It allows you to seamlessly connect any device over wifi and do lots of cool stuff. As a developer you will find it most useful to copy files to and from the devices, install and take backup of apps and get other important info from the device. It has many other uses for non-developers too.
AirDroid on Play Store
3] x86 based emulators
Everyone knows that the standard arm based emulators that come with the Android-SDK are painfully slow. It can take from anything between 30 seconds to 3 minutes to run an application on the emulator ( depending upon apk size). This can be quite frustrating for most people to wait for a long time to test their changes. But have no worry, the x86 emulator comes to the rescue. These emulators run directly on the x86 / x64 machine on your pc and are pretty fast. At times even faster than developing on a real device. You have two options here, either use the x86 Intel Atom image that comes with the SDK or use custom images in Virtual Box. Both have their own pros and cons, but I found the custom images in Virtual Box to be faster. The custom images also have play store app (which SDK emulators lack). Among the variety of custom images, I love the one hosted at http://androvm.org/blog/.
asloob 