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Comment by deskamess | Hacker News Reader

They make a very good Android emulator as well.

Which is, sadly, discontinued. It's still available for download though but the latest OS is 6.0 and many versions missing.

They pressured google. That was the point. Google does not give a flying fuck about developer experience. I am not saying that is wrong or right. I am saying this was the case for Google for many years. They just didn't give fuck about the experience.

But look at the timing. Everyone was nagging on google for years about slow emulator. They didn't do shit for years. Microsoft released an emulator, which was superior in almost all aspect. Just after that Google released new emulator. and now it does make sense to discontinue that project.

> But look at the timing.

Coincidentally, that was around the same time that Microsoft filed an Amicus brief supporting Oracle (in Oracle v. Google) arguing that APIs should be copyrightable[1].

Did that Project Astoria implement Android APIs? Would Google go after Microsoft in court had they officially released this? My guess is "yes" to both these questions. Nothing says wilful infringement louder than submitting a legal document to the courts spelling out why you think what you're doing (Astoria) is wrong.

1. http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20130221153759...

I think you are wrong on the Google front. Google did everything to please devs. Take apple for example, they won't think twice about refusing your app. Google OTOH, since the early days, lacked so much in the Appstore, that they let all sort of trash inside. They just wanted the devs more than quality.

Wait till you have someone file a wrongful copyright complaint against your Google Play App. Google took ours down two weeks ago and won't respond to our appeals despite clearly owning the copyright for all work done on the app.

Just like Chrome extensions that get removed without warning and you can't even get an answer of why and how you can fix the situation (submitting it for manual review fixes nothing).

Are you the developer of Frozen Elsa Anna Lego Movie Pregnant Tooth Extraction and Foot Doctor 7 by any chance?

I'm guessing you never had to use the old emulator.

How many platforms does that Microsoft emulator work on? One? Unlike Microsoft, Google supports 3 development platforms and so their new emulator also had to support 3 platforms. Also, the new emulator was written from scratch and that takes time.

> Unlike Microsoft, Google supports 3 development platforms and so their new emulator also had to support 3 platforms

No it didn't. If platform specific solutions make sense then we should use platform specific solutions. Not everything has to be cross platform and 100% identical across all platforms.

Except when you develop a cross platform IDE and emulator that requires feature parity across them all.

Feature parity does not mean the exact same tools on every platform. Trying to be identical across 3 platforms always means adopting the lowest common denominator and always results in being equally shit on every platform.

It's astounding that people still try to ignore the last 30 years of evidence of this.

So Linux users should get the shaft because they're the minority? Android Studio and the emulator work very well on all 3 platforms.

>Trying to be identical across 3 platforms always means adopting the lowest common denominator and always results in being equally shit on every platform.

In that case we're fortunate that Xcode isn't cross platform.

> So Linux users should get the shaft because they're the minority?

Linux users should get the best possible experience on the system, so should the windows users. If a better emulator is available on windows why should they get shafted? Linux tools even have the advantage that they may not need full emulation in the first place, but instead we end up with the worst of both worlds.

> Android Studio and the emulator work very well on all 3 platforms.

In my experience nothing about android development works very well on any platform. I'm not a huge fan of MS, but windows phone development and tools are an absolute dream in comparison.

>Linux users should get the best possible experience on the system, so should the windows users. If a better emulator is available on windows why should they get shafted? Linux tools even have the advantage that they may not need full emulation in the first place, but instead we end up with the worst of both worlds.

You seem to be under the impression that if you develop a cross platform solution that it's going to be inherently inferior. I disagree with that and the new Android emulator is proof of that. It's superior to the MS Android emulator in every way and it's also available on all 3 platforms.

>In my experience nothing about android development works very well on any platform.

In that case you probably don't have much experience developing for Android.

>I'm not a huge fan of MS, but windows phone development and tools are an absolute dream in comparison.

If developing for windows platform is a dream then why is their app store a cesspool filled with horrible looking apps?

Ive previously done iOS development (on the side) and tried Android development in the last few weeks and it feels like a massive, horrible hacked together pipeline. Why go through this horrible hack of a pipeline, recompiling and modifying .class files when you can instead create a compiler which does it directly?

So you could spend three times as much money and design completely different products for each platform, or you could have one codebase with a limited number of special cases for the different platforms and invest the saved money into making a better product...

How did you calculate 3 times as much? No one said nothing can be shared across platforms.

And again, we've got 3 decades of evidence that show precious few good cross platform solutions, so investing the saved money into making a better product doesn't seem to work.

That is no excuse for letting the emulator stagnate for several years, without any kind of visible change in regards to performance.

They hire PhDs capable of sorting out the incredible whiteboard and phone CS exercises for something.

Also apparently all those Phd weren't able to do what GenyMotion guys and girls were happily developing.

How many platforms is GenyMotion available on?

Well, Intel introduced HAXM a long time ago. It made it run quit faster.

It'd make sense if Hyper-V wasn't monopolistic. You can't run both at the same time, or better, no other virtualization host is allowed when Hyper-V is on. Which sucks.

The problem there if I am not mistaken is the CPU Virtualization extensions that can't handle multiple hypervisors using them at the same time.

That's true but it sure is convenient for Microsoft, and they are exploiting it as far as they can with the Credential Guard feature.

Sure is convenient for Red Hat, that you can't run KVM and Xen at the same time

Sure is convenient for VMware that you can't run Virtualbox and VMware Workstation at the same time

Absolutely a business decision by Microsoft, and not a limitation of the x86 chip

Also other virtualization hosts on the desktop don't have this problem at all. You can run all of the others at the same time.

where do you see it discontinued?

I suggested an improvement and got back an email.

https://blog.rthand.com/post/2017/05/02/good-bye-visual-stud...

From the documentation: Make sure “x86” is selected as the architecture. [...] Remember to make sure your APKs have code built for x86!

Where can I download it? Latency on Bluestacks is awful.

https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/msft-android-emulator/

If not using Visual Studio, search for 'Acquire on its own' on the page. There is a link in that section.

https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/msft-android-emulator/

It uses Hyper-V so you will need a Pro version of Windows.

I've always been kind of bummed out that Hyper-V is disabled on the OS layer for basic Windows versions, even if the hardware supports it.

They have to justify the extra price somehow... I don't blame them too much, odds are you are a "pro" user if you want/need Hyper-V. I really like Hyper-V (except the network weirdness no occasion).

If only they'd add GPU passthrough on non server Windows editions...

At the very least make it a pro feature.

Because it breaks other VMs - Vmware, Virtualbox, Intel Haxm. They don't work if Hyper-V is enabled.

A better bluestacks alternative would be anbox.

I believe Anbox employs Linux kernel modules, so WSL would need to load those to work under Windows.

... or implement the interfaces provided by Anbox.

It would be if it worked on anything except Ubuntu that is. Maybe a month ago when I tried it was different, but there was no amount of installing and tweaking I could do to get it to work on Arch.

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