Build and run a profileable app manually

To build a profileable application manually, you need to first build a release application and then update its manifest file, which turns the release application into a profileable application. After you configure the profileable application, launch the profiler and select a profileable process to analyze.

Build a release app

To build a release application for profiling purposes, do the following:

  1. Sign your application with the debug key by adding the following lines to your application's build.gradle file. If you already have a working release build variant, you can skip to the next step.

            buildTypes {
              release {
                signingConfig signingConfigs.debug
              }
            }
          
  2. In Android Studio, select Build > Select Build Variant... and choose the release variant.

Change release to profileable

To convert your release app to a profileable app, do the following:

  1. Open the AndroidManifest.xml file and adding the following within <application>. For more details, see Build your app for release.

    <profileable android:shell="true"/>

  2. Depending on the SDK version, you might see an error related to manifest validation; if you can't resolve them and deem it safe to treat the errors as warnings, you can do so by adding the following lines to your build.gradle file.

          aaptOptions {
            additionalParameters =["--warn-manifest-validation"]
          }