The getting started guide for Android apps on Phonegap misses out a few key pieces of information.
- Don’t install your Android SDK in Program Files, or any other folder with a space in it. Eclipse will fail on the build, and uninstalling and reinstalling the SDK somewhere else is just a pain.
- If you want to deploy to your device in developer mode and you’re on windows, you’ll need the USB driver. This is buried in the Android SDK installation guide
- Another way to deploy to your device is plain old file transfer. Unlike iOS, you don’t need a specific developer or enterprise license to do this. This involves exporting a signed app, which is a bit more involved.
- Luckily http://www.androiddevelopment.org/2009/01/19/signing-an-android-application-for-real-life-mobile-device-usage-installation/ tells you all you need to know. You can now however create a signed application through Eclipse export, so the last step can be missed.
- Once you have a signed app, all you need to do is connect your device to your PC, go into file transfer mode and copy across the apk file.
- To install it, you’ll finally need to find the .apk file in My files and click to install. Job done. You can delete the apk file and open the application as normal from the Applications screen.