Fast Android emulator using VirtualBox

Genymotion is absolutely amazing. Not only is it super fast but also has images with Google Apps, which are almost impossible to get on an emulator.

The downside of using Genymotion is that it's so fast it will hide a lot of performance issues that you will see when running on an actual device. So please, test early and often on actual hardware with extreme amounts of data.

For speed, nothing beats Genymotion. If also want to test the latest android, I found installing the latest Android-x86 image under virtualbox to be painless. If you want to run ARM code, be sure to install the Intel ARM translator. There are also several very fast Windows options too, such as Windroy[2], YouWave[3], and BlueStacks[4]. All of these solutions run faster than the official android emulator.

[1] http://www.android-x86.org/documents/virtualboxhowto

[2] http://www.socketeq.com/

[3] http://youwave.com/

[4] http://www.bluestacks.com/

Genymotion is a breath of fresh air for Android development, much needed.

Recording screencasts is a big win. It was previously too slow using emulators or screen cappers. There are a few Android apps that do it directly on the device, but you have to root it to run them!

Also, it's great for co-workers who don't have an Android device. e.g. we're porting to iOS app right now, and the iOS developer can see Android features without having an Android device.

And they force you to have at least one numeric.

Someone spent time and effort implementing this, thinking it must be a good idea. Why?

Am I the exception here? I've always found the qemu x86 images fast enough (with kvm support in the kernel). Genymotion doesn't feel particularly faster than the standard x86 images.

Could this be a non-Linux phenomenon?

I think I'll benchmark it in the near future!