cordova run (in real) android device using command line?

you can do

cordova run android

as documented here.

That did not work for me for some reason. so what I did was copy the apk to the device. install it. and use chrome's remote debugging . by goint to chrome://inspect in chrome.

You can force the run on device like this

cordova run android --device

If you get an error message like "No devices found" then make sure that you have developer mode and USB Debugging enabled on the device and also run adb kill-server and then adb devices should list your device and cordova run android --device should work

For iOS you can run from macOS

cordova run ios --device

If it doesn't work, make sure you have ios-sim and ios-deploy installed and that you have your development certificate and a wildcard provisioning profile on your machine. You can open the .xcworkspace file on /platforms/ios/ and Xcode will help you to create the certificates and provisioning profiles when you try to run the app.

If a real device is connected to your pc and it is recognized as well, you ca just use
cordova run android
and the app will start on your device. It worked for me.