Between the introduction of Instant Run and Genymotion going to a paid business model, I'd say the Emulator has improved exponentially. I tend to alternate between using the Emulator and using a device depending on what I'm working on.
Yes, I've found it to be much faster than it used to be and they've added a lot of settings to simulate different environments. They also recently added quick boot in the preview (https://developer.android.com/studio/preview/emulator.html) to improve the boot times.
no. but you should be using 1) virtualbox running android x86 ans 2) real devices for final arm testing
I mostly use real devices.
I didn't know you could install Android on Virtualbox, thanks for the tip!
> virtualbox running android x86
is it faster than emulator properly configured to use KVM or Haxm with x86 image?
yes. just open port 5555 and then connect via tcp on your dev box (which in my case, is another virtual box vm running ubuntu so i can wipe everything down every time a new version of android studio arrives --you DO NOT want to upgrade)
Thanks, I'll give it a shot next time I need the emulator.
I found a fault when using a webview and rendering em's - it (as well as Chrome in debug mode for touch devices) didn't show the 8x scaling issue you get with a real device, which was annoying.