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How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

blogs.nuxeo.com

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Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#41

Post by chc »

ceejayoz wrote: post #30
chc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his point is that it's easy to ignore serious usability problems when you're using better hardware than your customers. For example, developers with big screens are more prone to create GUIs that do not work well on small screens. Similarly, some Xbox games are unplayable in 480i or 480p mode because nobody ever bothered to check whether the interface elements were readable at low resolutions.

> I think his point is that it's easy to ignore serious usability problems when you're using better hardware than your customers. Only if you don't test on real devices.

Testing is not a boolean. You won't notice if some item on a checklist took a couple of seconds during your daily device test, but a user will notice when that action is all he's doing, over and over.

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#43

Post by ceejayoz »

chc wrote: post #41
ceejayoz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think his point is that it's easy to ignore serious usability problems when you're using better hardware than your customers. Only if you don't test on real devices.

Testing is not a boolean. You won't notice if some item on a checklist took a couple of seconds during your daily device test, but a user will notice when that action is all he's doing, over and over.

You say "testing is not a boolean", then imply that testing "over and over" is? Developing on the emulator doesn't stop you from doing nice, lengthy real usage testing on the devices once you've got everything in decent shape.

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#44

Post by cookiecaper »

thevectorist wrote: post #38
camdykeman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Such a pain" as compared to what exactly? This will depend entirely on what it is that youre trying to do. In all my experience, Android is notoriously easy to develope on, being fully open-source the way it is. Try developing for iOS beyond a the basics and I think you'll come to agree. I dont think its fair to call the emulator an obstacle, it just comes with limitations. After all, emulators are only designed to…

Please don't put words into my mouth or make assumptions about me. I am primarily an iOS dev. An app I worked on won an Apple Design Award and multiple other apps are in the Top 5 paid apps for their category in the iTunes store. To say that I develop for iOS at a basic level is laughable at best. XCode isn't perfect, but I don't need google for blog posts or spend hours writing scripts or messing with configuration…

The Android application I'm developing is immensely easier because of Android's open-source nature. Not only are things simpler on my physical phone because of cyanogenmod, but the basis for my program is actually Google's Camera app -- I literally copy the code verbatim and make the necessary changes. My project would be many, many more times work if I had to start a camera application from scratch (for what I want to do, using the intent that exports to the native camera widgets that are pluggable into your application is not sufficient, I need full control of the process).

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#45

Post by cookiecaper »

shagrath wrote: post #25
jamesu wrote: post #3

Makes me wonder why the SDK doesn't use an x86 vm by default in the first place.

At Google I/O, the sdk team said it was coming in the next months (along with GPU support), but the downside was that KVM is not readily available outside linux

Not much of a downside imo. Serious non-.NET developers should be using Linux anyway.

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#46

Post by xthlc »

I've tried this. It's faster even than developing with a device -- once you get a good test/debug flow going it's awesome. Some big caveats though:

* No Google APIs. So no MapView.

* The various builds are quirky. I couldn't get networking to function in the "Stable" Froyo build. Meanwhile, the Gingerbread build used in the linked post reports the wrong SDK version (it claims Honeycomb but is actually Gingerbread). The deprecated Froyo build I tried didn't support Google Accounts. And so on.

Meanwhile, new builds are currently impossible due to the ongoing kernel.org outage (android-x86 has some hard submodule deps on git.android.kernel.org), so my attempts to go in and tweak the build were thwarted.

Still, very cool stuff. I think the iOS simulator is fantastic and I've been pining for something similar for Android. This doesn't quite meet my needs at the moment, but it would save me multiple hours per week if I could get it set up properly.

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#47

Post by bwblabs »

sskates wrote: post #29
dpcan wrote: post #26

I think any experienced Android dev will tell you, the best solution is to buy a bunch of used Android devices, plug them in, and publish to the device directly for testing. Wasting any time with the emulator or this "virtual machine" isn't going to cut it in the end anyway. The only time I fire up the emulators is to make sure my assets are scaling properly for the various screen sizes of devices I don't own yet.

As an Android dev, I have to say this is very true. Emulators either don't simulate or don't simulate well enough a lot of stuff that you really want to test, like picking up audio from a microphone, or getting your location from GPS. There are also a lot of device specific quirks that make code run differently on different devices, meaning if you really want to make sure your code runs everywhere you can't just get…

Well, the Android emulation is pretty good with GPS & call simulation, only limitation is Eclipse which only let you control 1 emulator (or device) at a time, but if you connect to the emulator port, you can manage quite a lot.

If you start with video (or even audio) displaying/capturing then the emulator is pretty fast useless indeed.

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#48

Post by aab »

sskates wrote: post #29
dpcan wrote: post #26

I think any experienced Android dev will tell you, the best solution is to buy a bunch of used Android devices, plug them in, and publish to the device directly for testing. Wasting any time with the emulator or this "virtual machine" isn't going to cut it in the end anyway. The only time I fire up the emulators is to make sure my assets are scaling properly for the various screen sizes of devices I don't own yet.

As an Android dev, I have to say this is very true. Emulators either don't simulate or don't simulate well enough a lot of stuff that you really want to test, like picking up audio from a microphone, or getting your location from GPS. There are also a lot of device specific quirks that make code run differently on different devices, meaning if you really want to make sure your code runs everywhere you can't just get…

Also, on the emulators you don't usually have Sense UI, Motoblur or any other custom crap the manufacturers decide to put on the real phones. At one point I had 10 Android phones for development & testing just to make sure everything runs the same way on all phones

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#49

Post by bigiain »

aab wrote: post #48
sskates wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Android dev, I have to say this is very true. Emulators either don't simulate or don't simulate well enough a lot of stuff that you really want to test, like picking up audio from a microphone, or getting your location from GPS. There are also a lot of device specific quirks that make code run differently on different devices, meaning if you really want to make sure your code runs everywhere you can't just get…

Also, on the emulators you don't usually have Sense UI, Motoblur or any other custom crap the manufacturers decide to put on the real phones. At one point I had 10 Android phones for development & testing just to make sure everything runs the same way on all phones

Ahhh, "write once, debug everywhere", where have I heard _that_ before?

(for me, that was a lesson learned in 1995 doing Macromedia "cross platform" Mac and Windows development)

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#50

Post by bwblabs »

bmelton wrote: post #31
dazmax wrote: post #27

Someone should sell a usb dongle with an ARM chip on it that can run android using the emulator on your dev machine for display and input. Debugging on a phone is not so bad, but it's not quite as nice as the iOS simulator experience.

That's exactly the purpose for which I bought the Nexus S, the Nexus One, and the HTC G1. They are the Google Reference devices. Admittedly, it's perhaps not as lean as what you're referring to, but as a testing sandbox, I've tried a lot of different phones, but nothing has worked as well, in a general sense, as the reference models.

I ended up buying the popular phones (HTC Desire HD, Samsung Galaxy S2, etc.) just for testing, I'm on iOS myself.

But just working from (non reference) phones is dangerous too, it's so annoying to implement the volume controls with a BroadcastReceiver for the ACTION_MEDIA_BUTTON Intent (works great on Motorola's), but fails on HTC, and you should just override onKeyUp()... all (Android) phones behave differently, and not only in (screen) specs. Samsung Galaxy S (http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/versioning.htm...] and if you do some (proxy) audio stream playback there is the [http://google.com/search?q=PVMFMemoryBufferReadDataStreamImp...] error with no real solutions...

The problem is, in the end, it should work on the popular devices, not the 'perfect' Android reference phones..

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