Android logcat “application” column is always empty

Question

Android logcat \"application\" column is always empty. I have latest version of android tools.

Answer 1

I tried all the other suggestions here and none of them worked. For me, the application is shown when running on the emulator, but not on my Galaxy Nexus.

It turns out I needed to add android:debuggable="true" to in my AndroiManifest.xml. See http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/application-element.html. People who use Eclipse don't see this problem because apparently Eclipse enables debugging automatically according to http://developer.android.com/tools/device.html.

Apparently apps need to be marked as debuggable to debug them on production ROMs, but they can be debugged anyway on debug ROMs, which is why it works on the emulator but not on the physical device. Another option is probably to build a debug ROM and install it on your device.

You'd think logcat should be able to figure out the application based on the PID rather than needing to have the app built for debugging.