Hi,

Even an app using only native activities generates an apk. Our Android projects and debugging the custom APK are meant for the usual app debugging ways of using an APK.

If you are compiling with BUILD_EXECUTABLE specified in the Android makefile, then you need to think of debugging more in terms of generic Linux debugging. As there is no gdbserver to use from the APK, you need to use the gdbserver from the Android device. Also, you should use the gdb from Android NDK directly and deploy the app manually with adb. You should search for which adb commands to execute in order to debug executables build with BUILD_EXECUTABLE.

With VisualGDB it would probably be easiest to make a custom project in the same android project solution and use that custom project just for deploying and debugging. Setting the custom project dependent on the android project and keeping the custom project as the startup project will make the building and debugging work well together. A custom project allows specifying arbitrary sequences of commands for debugging and is easy to setup once you know which commands to execute.