Android emulator abused to introduce malware onto PCs • Hacker News Board

Re: Android emulator abused to introduce malware onto PCs

#41

Post by midwestemo » Sat, Feb 06, 2021, 9:42 PM UTC

throw14082020 wrote: post #37

midwestemo wrote: post #4

I knew nox has been adware for a while and I'm surprised it's still being used. Literally go to r/noxappplayer and you'll see most of the top posts are about it being malware. If anyone's need a good android emulator, genymotion is probably the best and it's free for personal uses https://www.genymotion.com/fun-zone/

Why do you think genymotion is probably the best? I've compared genymotion and the Android Studio's default emulator, and found Genymotion to be buggy and has fewer features. Have you compared them recently, or are you speaking with older experience? There has been a lot of development and optimisation for the Android Studio emulators. I guess we're not both Android developers, and you use the emulator for gaming?

Genymotion seems to be fine from me, I don't remember having zero bugs from my experience. However as you pointed, yes I'm speaking from past experiences from like 5 months ago. I know that android studio has an emulator but I remember it being more suited for development than personal gaming compared to genymotion

Re: Android emulator abused to introduce malware onto PCs

#42

Post by belltaco » Sun, Feb 07, 2021, 1:34 AM UTC

Daho0n wrote: post #24

belltaco wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security by obscurity? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/malware-found... Imagine how many more attacks there would be if Linux was much more popular.

It is only used in ~80% of some of the most valuable targets on the internet, the servers, and it is only by far the most used operating system with more than 50% compared to the huge target that is the ~15% that is Windows. Security by obscurity is more fitting for Windows than Linux. Imagine how many more attacks there would be if Windows was much more popular. Windows in on par with iOS. Stop being a troll. https:…

>it is only by far the most used operating system with more than 50%

So you're counting Android as Linux, that means Linux has a big malware problem right? Or do you only count Android to pad Linux's numbers and then discount Android malware?

Servers are managed by relatively much more tech savvy folks who install programs carefully. Not so much on PCs that aren't locked down like iOS, and where there is developer freedom.

iOS is only more secure than Windows at the cost of developer freedom, sad to see people on a techie site praise iOS and insult Windows based on that.

Re: Android emulator abused to introduce malware onto PCs

#43

Post by pjmlp » Sun, Feb 07, 2021, 9:34 AM UTC

maxhille wrote: post #29

freeone3000 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is incredibly nonperformant. Even with HAXM. Developers use real devices. This is marketed for people who want to run android games on their PC.

Android app dev since 10 years here - performance is absolutely fine. I have it running all the time. Granted, performance was abysmal before the accelerated Intel images, but that was many years ago. Devs complaining about Android emulator performance usually have problems with their setup, common culprits: Not enough ram (it is a VM in the end), slow machine (eg. MacOS is bad for Android dev), broken VM acceleratio…

Speaking from experience, unless one has a desktop gaming rig, Android development is plain awful.

Only doing WebSphere 5 with RAD comes close as bad experience, and even in 2005 it was faster than doing Android builds.

Also the emulator is unusable for any kind of graphics programming testing.

Re: Android emulator abused to introduce malware onto PCs

#44

Post by pjmlp » Sun, Feb 07, 2021, 9:37 AM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #39

freeone3000 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is incredibly nonperformant. Even with HAXM. Developers use real devices. This is marketed for people who want to run android games on their PC.

Performance is perfectly fine as long as you pick an image with your computer's native instruction set and have hardware acceleration. Performance through QEMU (ARM on x64, x64 on M1) is terrible, of course, but that's to be expected with software instruction translation. With proper acceleration (which may be unavailable on Windows without some tweaking, even after installing HAXM!), Android will run similar to a st…

Most shops have i5 and i7 laptop devices with 8GB, so....