Having trouble using my laptop as a proxy for my smartphone

I want to capture my smartphone network logs on jmeter. This usually requires that my smartphone accesses the internet through my laptop by using it as a proxy and making jmeter listen on the port through which the smart phone is connected. Here are a few references I found on the internet:

http://findnerd.com/list/view/-How-to-Connect-the-Android-Mobile-Device-to-JMETER/4929/

https://dzone.com/articles/how-to-record-mobile-appli-cation-traffic

There are others references but they essentially say the exact same thing. I followed all the steps but my smartphone is unable to access the Internet when I set its proxy to my laptop's IP address . The only difference could be that since the motherboard wifi adaptor had started malfunctioning sometime back, I am using a USB WiFi adaptor on my laptop. I need to know how to make this work and capture my smartphone network logs on my laptop using jmeter. Any help appreciated

UPDATE - Found the issue. I needed to install an SSL certificate on my Android phone. This certificate is generated by jmeter in it's bin folder. I had to send to to my Android device and install it. Now, I can access the internet on my phone through my browser and o am able to see the https traffic being recorded in JMETER. but, when I try to access any apps, it gives me the following error:

javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: Received fatal alert: certificate_unknown.

I know it has something to do with the self-signed certificate generated by Jmeter, but I am not sure why it's working for chrome and not for apps. Anybody know any solutions to this?