If you are using VSCode from the android repo, you can go to the "Run and Debug" Badge, and select "Debug NativeAOT" from the drop down. This will let you debug the NativeAOT sample. Fire up your emulator or connect your device, then click the play button next to "Debug NativeAOT" and it will launch the app. If the Java debugger dialog is not cleared automatically, goto the "Debug Console" which should be showing the lldb REPL, and type clearjdb. Your app should then continue.

Note it will take some time to build and install the NativeAOT sample. VSCode will probably
give you an option to cancel or wait, you can just ignore this dialog.

If you want to to use lldb directly then you can use the runwithdebugger.sh/runwithdebugger.ps1 scripts to run all the steps you need to setup the debugger manually.
What follows is an explanation of what that script does.

How runwithdebugger.* scripts work

The first this the script does is to install the application. It does this using the
Install MSBuild target.

dotnet-local.sh build samples/NativeAOT/NativeAOT.csproj -c Debug -t:Install -tl:off

Next it needs to install lldb-server on the device.
The following steps, install the lldb-server, stop any existing lldb-server process and then launches it. It also sets up the required adb port forwarding so we can connect to the server from the local machine.

adb push $(ANDROID_NDK_HOME)/toolchains/llvm/prebuilt/darwin-x86_64/lib/clang/19/lib/linux/aarch64/lldb-server /data/local/tmp/lldb-server
adb shell run-as net.dot.hellonativeaot cp /data/local/tmp/lldb-server .
adb forward tcp:5039 tcp:5039
adb shell run-as net.dot.hellonativeaot killall -9 lldb-server
adb shell run-as net.dot.hellonativeaot ./lldb-server platform --listen "*:5039" --server

Note: We have to run the lldb-server in the context of the app so it has the correct networking permissions. This is why we use the run-as command.

Note: the path clang/*/lib/ might change depending on your version of the NDK.

Once lldb-server is up and running, the script with run up the app using the following

adb shell am start -S --user "0" -a "android.intent.action.MAIN" -c "android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" -n "net.dot.hellonativeaot/my.MainActivity" -D

The -D is important as it stops the app from running until the java debugger is attached. This can be useful if your app is crashing on startup.
If you do not want to the app to pause on startup, you can omit the -D argument.

Now that the app is running we need to get the process id. We do that using adb shell ps.
The grep is used to filter the results to only our app.

adb shell ps | grep net.dot.hellonativeaot

The script then uses awk or and regex to extract the process id.
It then adds an adb port forward for port 8700 to this process id. This is so we can easily
attach the java debugger (jdb) to the app to clear the debugger dialog box.

What does the launch.json do?

In addition to the script above, there are a number of commands in launch.json which are
run when launching via VSCode. If you want to run these manually rather than using VSCode
you will need to use lldb from the command line it execute the following commands.

lldb
> platform select remote-android
> platform connect connect://localhost:5039 
> settings set target.process.thread.step-in-avoid-nodebug true
> settings set target.process.thread.step-out-avoid-nodebug true
> command script import samples/NativeAOT/lldb_commands.py,
> command script add -f lldb_commands.clearjdb clearjdb
> target create samples/NativeAOT/bin/Debug/net10.0-android/android-arm64/native/NativeAOT.so
> target select 0
> process attach --pid <processid>

These setup lldb and loads the symbols, then attaches to the process. It also sets up
a clearjdb command which you can use from within the lldb REPL to clear the Java
Debugger dialog you get when you launch your app.

If your symbols are in a separate .dbg file, you can use the following.

> target symbols add samples/NativeAOT/bin/Debug/net10.0-android/android-arm64/native/NativeAOT.so.dbg

Next you need to attach the java debugger to clear the dialog which is currently blocking the application execution. You can skip this step if you omitted the -D when
launching the activity.

you can do this via the lldb terminal by using the clearjdb function which is an
extension function we have.

or use the following from the command line.

python3 samples/NativeAOT/lldb_commands.py

alternatively, you can also clear it manually via

adb forward --remove tcp:8700
adb forward tcp:8700 jdwp:<pid>
jdb -attach localhost:8700 

You will want to type quit to exit the jdb terminal once it has connected.
If you used the script you will not need to setup the adb port forward.

Breakpoints

Setting breakpoints just need to use the filename and line number, these are just standard lldb commands.

breakpoint set -f MainActivity.cs -l 34

This will place a breakpoint at line 34 of MainActivity.cs.