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Comment by qeorge | Hacker News Reader

I jumped into Android development about a month ago, and after a slow start its really been fun. I hated Eclipse at first, but it gets a lot better with time.

The emulator though - don't bother. The author is not exaggerating about several minutes to load. Just buy an Android phone and debug on that, or you'll spend more time cursing at the emulator than coding.

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I mostly use real Android devices for developing and debugging. However, another alternative is running Android-x86 in a VirtualBox. (If you aren't trying to test native ARM code, of course.) It's very fast, and I use it sometimes to test different screen resolutions and DPI's.

I've found that booting the emulator does take a minute or two (I don't know about "several", but that's besides the point), but you don't have to restart every time you make a change or anything. It's just a once-per-session thing unless you accidentally close it.

Still, you will have to wait for around 30s for each refresh; While the new binary gets uploaded

My experience has been that it takes much less time than that, probably somewhere in the area of 5-15 seconds. I've only worked on tiny personal projects though; maybe this varies a lot based on project size.

My experience has been that it takes much less time than that, probably somewhere in the area of 5-15 seconds. I've only worked on tiny personal projects though; maybe this varies with project size a lot.

To me it still doesn't matter. It could take one second to load a binary, the emulator is completely unusable they way it currently is built. Android is already into it's 3rd revision and they somehow have managed to completely ignore this pink elephant.

If the best advice you can tell people is not to use it, use a real device then why bother include it at all.

Just start the emulator op in the morning. There is no reason to shot it down when you go back to coding.

I was going to ask whether there was a problem with your 'u' key, but you used it in "you". I'm confused.

Jst trying to confose you more - He used 'u' in more than just you. (Just, emulator)

It's true. The first time I ran the emulator it took a good 5 minutes to boot up. But because it took so long, I thought my computer froze or that I had made a mistake in installing the SDK since I had usually given up after waiting 30 seconds for the emulator.

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