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Android Needs A Simulator, Not An Emulator

jakewharton.com

21–30 of 46 posts

Re: Android Needs A Simulator, Not An Emulator

#21
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you avoid/handle abuses like using it as a proxy to access extremely illegal things?

How does AWS do that with their remote desktop in the cloud service? If you use this service, I have your name and credit card number.

You have a name and credit card number which may or may not belong to the person using the service.

Re: Android Needs A Simulator, Not An Emulator

#22

I wonder if an Android device as a service would work. No, I don't mean loaning devices. I mean by the hour remote control of an Android device you can take over. Your end looks like the simulator, my end is a farm of Android devices which get a factory reset between every client connecting. You reserve it for as long as you want, or just do one-off testing. Edit: I suppose I should ask a more concrete question: woul…

This exists: http://www.keynote.com/solutions/testing/mobile-testing

I've used it fairly extensively, it can be a bit buggy and slow, but it was instrumental in tracking down a bug just after launching an Android app.

People were leaving 1-star reviews, saying the app simply hard crashed at launch. We couldn't replicate the issue in any way on any of our ~10 physical devices we used for testing, or in any VM, but, with the service, we were able to isolate it exclusively to a handful of Android 2.3.3 devices with less than 512mb of memory. After that it was much easier to track down the source of the bug, fix it, and stem the flow of bad reviews.

Android is so fragmented among versions and devices that in the future I'd always want to use a service like this to at the very least make sure the app opens and runs across a slew of devices before launching.

Re: Android Needs A Simulator, Not An Emulator

#23

I wonder if an Android device as a service would work. No, I don't mean loaning devices. I mean by the hour remote control of an Android device you can take over. Your end looks like the simulator, my end is a farm of Android devices which get a factory reset between every client connecting. You reserve it for as long as you want, or just do one-off testing. Edit: I suppose I should ask a more concrete question: woul…

I like this idea as well, it seems fruitful enough that at least one organisation is providing it [0]. I would have thought overheads of getting new devices might cut into revenue though. I'd be interested to see what the difference in experience is for something on an emulated device (with HAXM) and a remote real device though, and if it's substantial enough to be worth paying for.

[0] : http://www.keynote.com/solutions/testing/mobile-testing

Re: Android Needs A Simulator, Not An Emulator

#24
When I started a new job doing iOS development, I was a bit surprised that Apple provided a simulator and not an emulator for iPhone/iPad development. An emulator seemed like a better choice, because it would be more realistic. Realism turned out not to be a big issue, at least for the kind of app we were developing, and I guess iOS and Android devices are just too fast to emulate on a desktop with reasonable performance.

Re: Android Needs A Simulator, Not An Emulator

#25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does AWS do that with their remote desktop in the cloud service? If you use this service, I have your name and credit card number.

You have a name and credit card number which may or may not belong to the person using the service.

Nothing is 100% in this world, its a good enough filter.

Re: Android Needs A Simulator, Not An Emulator

#26

I wonder if an Android device as a service would work. No, I don't mean loaning devices. I mean by the hour remote control of an Android device you can take over. Your end looks like the simulator, my end is a farm of Android devices which get a factory reset between every client connecting. You reserve it for as long as you want, or just do one-off testing. Edit: I suppose I should ask a more concrete question: woul…

There are a few of these out there including http://developer.samsung.com/remotetestlab/rtlDeviceList.act...

Re: Android Needs A Simulator, Not An Emulator

#27
post #5

Have you guys heard of GennyMotion? It's way faster than the actual Android Emulator. My Professor for my Android Class in college recommended it to use for debugging for our assignments if we didn't have an Android Device. http://www.genymotion.com/

Wow, that page has a 2.5mb png as a background image on one of the elements.

wow, how many jqueries is that?

Re: Android Needs A Simulator, Not An Emulator

#28
post #3

The only thing I'd like is maybe a gradle build for ADT. I like my workflow I just hate placing required android libs on the path by hand, so time consuming. I only test on devices so the emulator thing to me is really a non issue. That said, I would love a "simulator" since it would probably mean that Google has wrapped the JDK with an Android interface which frees me from having to every use Swing/SWT/ any other ja…

Are you doing your integration and instrumentation tests on actual devices as well?

I only do manual testing since Im a hobbyist android dev.

Re: Android Needs A Simulator, Not An Emulator

#29
What platform(s) would the simulator support? Just GNU/Linux? Even that is quite different from actual Android in some ways, e.g. glibc instead of bionic. It's easy by comparison for Apple to provide a simulator, because the simulator only has to run on Mac OS X, which basically shares everything below the UI toolkit with iOS.

Re: Android Needs A Simulator, Not An Emulator

#30

I wonder if an Android device as a service would work. No, I don't mean loaning devices. I mean by the hour remote control of an Android device you can take over. Your end looks like the simulator, my end is a farm of Android devices which get a factory reset between every client connecting. You reserve it for as long as you want, or just do one-off testing. Edit: I suppose I should ask a more concrete question: woul…

You might like Manymo -- our company -- it's Android emulators as a service. Every recent OS and screen size combo; launches in a couple of second. Accessible from a browser, or in ADB.

https://www.manymo.com/

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