Hacker News Reader

Comment by crowbahr | Hacker News Reader

I disagree that the emulator sucks. With HAXM enabled it boots up at least as fast as the iOS emu and I can customize it to run different images of android.

Overall I love it. Compared with Xcode and the work I was doing before on iOS Android Studio is a dream.

View on HN

Based on how the Android EMU used to run early on, it is much better. Even then, it is still 50/50 when starting if it will actually boot (and then if Android Studio will connect for debugging). HAXM has helped, but the whole process is very buggy.

Xcode is not the greatest development environment, but the iOS simulator/debugging actually works.

Android development is painful unless you have an physical device to develop with.

> Android development is painful unless you have an physical device to develop with.

Does anybody develop a serious Android application without testing it on an actual device?

I do a huge chunk of my development with physical devices. It would just be nice to have a quick and reliable emulator as a fallback for those times when you don't want to carry a development device, or when attaching it to your machine would be awkward, risky, or horrifically dorky looking.

Not testing, developing.

The IDE talks to the emulator via ADB. It does not have to talk just to the emulator, though. You can replace it with a physical device, the IDE doesn't care.

When you replace the emulator with a physical device, it gets much better.

Testing no. Develop yes. The people with Android phones in the office can add entire features to our iOS application using only the simulator and then test on a device once they are almost done. Trying to do the same on Android is an exercise in frustration.

My main complaints are - 1) The updates for GPS versions have been quite bad recently. 2) Can't run VirtualBox and Haxm on the same machine.

> Can't run VirtualBox and Haxm on the same machine.

That's exactly what I do. Didn't try it on the same time, though.

What I had problem with in the past, was running Hyper-V and HAXM. Both require their own hypervisor, both need a reboot to activate it and they cannot be active at the same time.

Interesting. Doing work on both platforms, I have had the exact opposite experience. I used to feel like an empty shell of false hope when on the Android side of things, like trying to babysit a rebellious teenager. I suppose it comes down to preference.

I definitely think preference is a lot of it. Just figured I'd share my experience as a happy android dev!

Can you please tell more about your hardware? CPU, GPS, RAM and motherboard? I am genuinely interested. Would like to know the configuration which makes Android development pleasant.

My emulator runs great although I still have a HDD(vs SSD) which bottlenecks emulation once in a while. My setup is a Core i7 3770K, 32GB of DDR3 RAM, and Windows 7 Enterprise. My emulator is currently consuming 2.7GB of RAM.

Thanks for sharing.

Not the above, but it runs great for me on both my desktop (Intel i5-6600K, 32GB RAM, SSD, some random ASUS ROG mobo), my old desktop setup (Intel i5-2500K, 16GB RAM, HDD) and my laptop (Intel i7-4760HQ, 16GB RAM, SSD).

It certainly runs far better than Xcode, since that won't even start on any of those!

I had a higher end Mac Pro when I was doing iOS development and Android Studio is way more stable than XCode and the emulator is at least as fast.

4.2ghz OC'd i5 4690K, 16gb ram (would like more though), Asus Maximus VI Hero ATX mobo, GTX 970 card. It's not a terribly fantastic setup, it's mainly the HAXM integration on the emulator. If you haven't tried the emulator since that was included you need to. It went from 5 minute startup to 30 seconds tops. And if it's already running then rerunning the app is nearly instant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com