No laptop? No problem. Code on the Go brings the debugger to your phone.

If you’ve been programming in other Android environments, you already know how typical debugging works: your app runs on a phone, and your IDE runs on a computer. The two talk to each other over a USB cable or Wi-Fi through Android Debug Bridge (ADB). The PC does the heavy lifting, the phone runs the app, and the cable or network connects them.

Code on the Go (CoGo™) breaks that model entirely. The IDE and the app being debugged are both running on the same Android device. There’s no PC, no cable, and no external connections or devices of any kind.

Getting a real debugger to work in these circumstances required some non-trivial rethinking of each layer of the standard Android debug stack. Here’s how we did it.

The traditional Android debugging “bridge” model

To understand what we had to work around, it helps to know how ADB normally works...

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