If you want a fast way to run Android, you can also use a VirtualBox image, it is significantly faster than the emulator in the SDK:
A better Android emulator
11–20 of 58 posts
Re: A better Android emulator
#12This looks extremely useful assuming it works. Although I never use the emulator while building Android because it basically does not work on most machines and does not give you any real indication how your code will run on an actual device. Very curious how they pulled this off.
I'm one of the founders of Manymo.
I feel your pain re: trouble running emulators for dev work. We built Manymo to address this pain. While it does not (yet) emulate custom android builds, like the dreaded HTC Sense builds, it does give me an emulator faster than I can spin one up locally.
I typcially develop with a phone and a tablet but using Manymo I can spin up a larger tablet or an odd-sized phone emulator to check how my Fragment code is laying out on a variety of device configurations. All of that without soaking up memory on my laptop. It helps testing against OS versions too. We also find it extrememly helpful when working with designers that do not have the SDK setup. The list goes on but suffice to say we are excited to see more people use this tool.
Re: A better Android emulator
#13If you want a fast way to run Android, you can also use a VirtualBox image, it is significantly faster than the emulator in the SDK: http://www.buildroid.org/blog/
I've found the official Intel-based emulator images (2.3+ only) plenty fast. Details here[0] but the tl;dr is:
* Open SDK manager, install Intel image for your preferred SDK version and the "Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager" from the Extras section
* Find the HAXM installer in SDK/extras and run
* Create Intel-based AVD
[0] https://developer.android.com/tools/devices/emulator.html
Re: A better Android emulator
#14I keep getting the page with the Android-fail-whale image. No idea what is going on... didn't last long this website. Can someone explain how does this work?
We are adding servers right now. In the meantime here is a short screencast of an earlier version in use: http://vimeo.com/48571832
Re: A better Android emulator
#15I've been putting off porting an iOS app to Android specifically because of my fear of testing on so many devices.
While I'm sad that there are 43 (and counting) possible variations, this looks solid and helpful — I'm much more likely to attempt my port project now.
Re: A better Android emulator
#16I keep getting the page with the Android-fail-whale image. No idea what is going on... didn't last long this website. Can someone explain how does this work?
Yup- Fail Droid.
Re: A better Android emulator
#17Is there any difference between this and having a real device with the same OS version and screen size?
I'm assuming 'this' is any emulated device and not specifically Manymo (which I haven't tried -- I keep getting the "Fail Droid"). But there are plenty: you can't test bluetooth, get network state, check battery status, and other things.
But emulators are ok to test your layouts, even though the latest ADT plugin makes it much simpler with layout previews.
Re: A better Android emulator
#18If you want a fast way to run Android, you can also use a VirtualBox image, it is significantly faster than the emulator in the SDK: http://www.buildroid.org/blog/
I've found the official Intel-based emulator images (2.3+ only) plenty fast. Details here[0] but the tl;dr is: * Open SDK manager, install Intel image for your preferred SDK version and the "Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager" from the Extras section * Find the HAXM installer in SDK/extras and run * Create Intel-based AVD [0] https://developer.android.com/tools/devices/emulator.html
Agreed. The Intel images turn the emulator into a generally useful tool. If you enable graphics acceleration in the AVD performance is more than good enough for testing the apps I've tried so far.
The emulator does take a while to start but that's a one-time cost.
Re: A better Android emulator
#19Re: A better Android emulator
#20What irks me most about the regular Android emulators and actually also testing on the devices themselves, is that alot of restrictions seems to be off in dev mode. In my instance i was using a jsonp webservice over https. Everything worked aces on the 2.1-2.3 emulators, and a device in dev mode, but when I published the app, turns out that the SSL certs, or rather the ssl trust chain, wasnt trusted in "Retail" mode on Android 2.1 and 2.2.. Why oh why did it work in the emulators and on the devices while developing..
On topic, this looks great!