New to Ionic and mobile development in general. I’m running on a Linux machine with my phone USB connected. According to docs the command “ionic run android” should run the app on my connected phone. Instead it starts the emulator. I can see the device in Linux and Android Studio recognizes it. I gave it permission to allow debugging.
try :
ionic build android
copy the android-debug.apk to your phone and install the apk.
Thanks. It was the OS. In Ubuntu you have to configure USB access - http://askubuntu.com/questions/213874/how-to-configure-adb-access-for-android-devices. After that, it started working.
awesome! 
Glad you got it sorted 