Flash Pro debugging on Nexus 7 via USB didn't work - at first.

I had a wonderful day so far. Although I have debugged on my Nexus 7 in the past, today it just didn't want to work.

Perhaps there are some bugs to be found here, but I'll leave that up to Adobe to decide.

I'd already been testing an app on my Droid 2 phone and then I switched to my Nexus 7.

Notification says its connected for USB debugging. Clicking on the notification brings up the developer option menu, but I notice its not in my settings screen where it used to be. (Must have disappeared after the last system update.)

I goto settings -> About tablet -> click the build number 7 times ( I hear its 10 for the Nexus 10)

Device now says I'm a developer and I can access the Developer options from the settings menu.

USB debugging is already checked.

Using the Nexus 7 notification I switched USB connection from a media device to a camera device.

I try to debug my app in Flash Pro, AIR for Android 3.5.0.880 but it just hangs when trying to load the app via USB.

I check the Win7 USB drivers - they are up to date. I uninstall and reinstall them anyway.

I made sure I had the latest version of Android SDK installed - no new USB drivers show up though.

Since I'm debugging, it has toggled off captive runtime.

I go to Android platform tools and run adb logcat from a cmd prompt and it can't seem to kill the outdated server and create a new one.

I visit StackOverflow. From advice I found there I open up my Win7 Task Manager and found 8 copies of ADB.exe running.

I kill them all. But every time I have to cancel out of a hung-up attempt by Flash Pro to publish to a USB device, more of those ADB.exe tasks get left behind and they have to manually be killed.

Now I can run adb logcat and see my device logs.

Finally it dawns on me that my Nexus 7 is running the latest version of AIR 3.7.0.186

On a hunch, I switch Flash Pro up to using AIR for Android 3.7.0.1530 and try again to debug. It forces to captive runtime and then runs the app on the device.

Turns out my Droid 2 device, which was running the debug app just fine, was running AIR 3.7.0.166. So I updated it to the latest version of AIR just to see if it exhibited the same problems - fortunately it didn't.

What irony. I'm developing on AIR 3.5 because AIR 3.7 forces captive runtime on my app and I don't always want that. But now it appears that AIR 3.7 has the added "benefit" of preventing debugging of older, non-captive runtime AIR apps on some devices. Actually, after further testing I can't even publish an AIR 3.5 captive-runtime app (debug off) straight to the device. No error though - just a silent hangup. I suppose that's one way Adobe can force developers to upgrade to the latest version of AIR and just accept having captive runtime forced on them. I have to wonder though if all my previously published apps are now going to stop working if users upgrade their devices to AIR 3.7.0.186. I really hope not.

Update: I can still side-load an AIR 3.5 captive-runtime app onto my Nexus 7 and run them.

  And older AIR 3.4 versions of the apps I work with still function on my Droid 2 running the latest AIR 3.7 runtimes. That makes be feel better.

I hope this info helps other developers.