Oh my goodness this was far too difficult… so I had to write it up! This guide assumes you have some experience with Unity, debugging in Visual Studio, and building APK’s (let me know if you don’t in the comments!).

If you’re using Unity, you’re coding in C#, and you’re using Visual Studio… Here’s how you can setup a remote debugger to debug your APK on an Android device.

I’m currently using the following tools but the steps are generally the same:

Unity v2020.1.7f1

Visual Studio Community 2019

Android Studio v3.5 & SDK

Samsung Galaxy S9

Step 1: When you build your APK you’ll want to tick 2 boxes on the build settings menu. ‘Development Build‘ & ‘Script Debugging‘

Step 2: Create your build as usual and copy the build to your Android device. Connect your Android Device to your PC via USB. Be sure your machine and Android device are connected to the same wifi network.

Step 3: If you haven’t previously, Enable USB Debugging on your Android Device.

1. Open Settings
2. Select System
3. Scroll to the bottom and select About Phone
4. Scroll to the bottom and tap ‘Build Number’ 7 times
5. Return to the previous screen and find ‘Developer Options’ near the bottom
6. Scroll down and select to enable ‘USB Debugging’

Step 4: Back on your computer, open up a cmd prompt (or terminal) as an administrator and change your directory to:

C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Local\Android\sdk\platform-tools

Step 5: Back on your Android Device, find the Android Device’s IP by going to:

1. Go to Settings
2. Go to ‘About Phone’
3. Got to ‘Status’
4. Find ‘IP Address’
5. Write it down…

Step 6: Back in your command prompt enter the following command:

adb tcpip 5555

If you need some extra help see the Unity Documentation here

Step 7: Connect to your Device with this command using your IP from Step 5:

adb connect [YourIpAddress]:5555

Step 8: Open Visual Studio from within Unity and go to the ‘Debug’ menu option. Select ‘Attach Unity Debugger’

Step 9: You should see a small menu popup and it should display both your computer and your connected Android device. Select your Android device, set some break points in your code, and have fun!

Hopefully this guide saves you some time and headache on trying to figure this out. If you need more information on connecting your device that this guide doesn’t provide let me know so I can update it!