Such a bummer, getting number 1 on HN and can't show your product...
A better Android emulator
31–40 of 58 posts
Re: A better Android emulator
#32If 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/
Thank you for the link. I'm already up and running. It's much faster than the SDK VM, boots almost instantly. Works perfectly with ADB and is just a pleasure to use.
Re: A better Android emulator
#33Dear HN moderators: the original title (about 43 Android emulators within the browser) was far more informative than this rewritten version.
Agreed, I clicked on the title expecting some kind of great update to the normal android emulator, with the old title I would not have been mislead.
Re: A better Android emulator
#34If 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
Just an FYI -- this killed my Virtual Box install the last time i tried it. Uninstalling HAXM fixed it all, but having Virtual Box was more important than the Intel images, so I left it uninstalled.
Re: A better Android emulator
#35Awesome! In my opinion a killer feature would be to add sharing/embedding support.
Re: A better Android emulator
#36Such a bummer, getting number 1 on HN and can't show your product...
I guess it is part of the problem space in this case. The reason they can compete with running the emulator locally is that is it so freaking slow. There are some cases where you can speed it up, like Intel emulator images and if you are lucky hardware OpenGL support, but these don't cover all the cases you often need to test, and many developers don't know about them or don't have systems that can use them anyway. So it being difficult to run the emulator fast is the main point of pain, which is the same thing making it tough for the company to scale in this case. Makes me wonder what they are using themselves to speed things up, if anything. Intel images, x86 branch of Android, ARM servers maybe somehow? Their solution would affect their scaling/server obtaining.
Re: A better Android emulator
#37I'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.
Get a low-end (HTC Legend), a mid-end (HTC Desire / Moto Droid), and a high-end (Samsung Galaxy Nexus or S-II/III) device, and you are good to go. Also get a cheap tablet if you need to support that. Always develop on the lowest end device as a rule, and the optimizations you apply to make it usable on it will make the app super snappy on higher end devices. Choose Android 2.2 as your target platform and you include…
What if you do want to mess with OpenGL? I ask because your advice above was really interesting and timely for me.
Re: A better Android emulator
#38I'll be the token Opera guy in the thread and reiterate that they have a mobile simulator as well: Mobile Emulator. It's annoying that it doesn't come with default iOS device settings, though, but it's a great alternative to running a server to test on.
... and I forgot to c/p the link from my tab like an idiot: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-mobile-emulator/.
Re: A better Android emulator
#39This 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.
> 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.
This has not been my experience in the least...
Re: A better Android emulator
#40Couldn't get it to work in Firefox 16.