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Android Developer Notes

This chapter contains random notes that I discovered while developing mobile apps with Xamarin Forms on the Android platform. I hope they are useful to you.

Unfortunately, your app has stopped

Sometimes, when operating with Android emulators, things will just break. Some of the ideas here may assist with getting things going again:

  1. Don't use a Shared Mono Runtime

    In Visual Studio, right-click the Android project, then select Properties or Options. In the Android Build section, select the General tab. Uncheck the checkbox next to Use Shared Mono Runtime.

  2. Disable non-required ABIs

    Also in Visual Studio, right-click the Android project, then select Properties or Options. In the Android Build section, select the Advanced tab. Select only the ABIs that you are using. For example, if you are running on the x86 emulator, you will want to disable the armeabi ABI.

Rebuild the entire project and then try running again.

Missing libaot-mscorlib.dll.so

When running an application is debug mode, I sometimes saw the following deployment issue:

D/Mono    ( 1366): AOT module 'mscorlib.dll.so' not found: dlopen failed: library "/data/app-lib/TaskList.Droid-2/libaot-mscorlib.dll.so" not found

To fix this:

  • Right-click on the Droid project and select Properties.
  • Select the Android Options tab.
  • Uncheck the Use Fast Deployment option.
  • Save the properties sheet.
  • Redeploy the application.

Fixing Errors with the Visual Studio Emulator for Android

One of the issues I found while running on the Visual Studio Emulator for Android involved debugging. The Android app starts, then immediately closes and debugging stops. In the output window, you see Could not connect to the debugger. To fix this:

  • Close the Android Emulator window.
  • Open the Hyper-V Manager.
  • Right-click the emulator you are trying to use and select Settings....
  • Expand the Processor node and select Compatibility.
  • Check the Migrate to a physical computer with a different processor version box.
  • Click on OK.

It's a good idea to do this on all the emulators. When you start the emulator, this error should be gone.

Disabling Visual Studio Emulator for Android

There are two emulators for Android. One is supplied by Microsoft (the Visual Studio Emulator for Android) and one is supplied by Google (the Google Android Emulator). You can only use one of them. To enable the usage of the Google Android Emulator, you have to disable the Visual Studio Emulator for Android.

To disable the Visual Studio Emulator for Android, disable Hyper-V with this command:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off

You should then reboot. If you wish to switch back to using the Visual Studio Emulator for Android, set the hypervisorlaunchtype to auto and reboot again.