A better Android emulator

Agreed, I clicked on the title expecting some kind of great update to the normal android emulator, with the old title I would not have been mislead.

I've found the official Intel-based emulator images (2.3+ only) plenty fast. Details here[0] but the tl;dr is:

* Open SDK manager, install Intel image for your preferred SDK version and the "Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager" from the Extras section

* Find the HAXM installer in SDK/extras and run

* Create Intel-based AVD

[0] https://developer.android.com/tools/devices/emulator.html

Thank you for the link. I'm already up and running. It's much faster than the SDK VM, boots almost instantly. Works perfectly with ADB and is just a pleasure to use.

These projects are still extremely awesome for those of us running older CPUs!

I'm one of the founders of Manymo.

I feel your pain re: trouble running emulators for dev work. We built Manymo to address this pain. While it does not (yet) emulate custom android builds, like the dreaded HTC Sense builds, it does give me an emulator faster than I can spin one up locally.

I typcially develop with a phone and a tablet but using Manymo I can spin up a larger tablet or an odd-sized phone emulator to check how my Fragment code is laying out on a variety of device configurations. All of that without soaking up memory on my laptop. It helps testing against OS versions too. We also find it extrememly helpful when working with designers that do not have the SDK setup. The list goes on but suffice to say we are excited to see more people use this tool.

> Although I never use the emulator while building Android because it basically does not work on most machines and does not give you any real indication how your code will run on an actual device.

This has not been my experience in the least...

Device Anywhere might be what you want. They connect real phones to their system for you to use, and have a large variety of models (or at least had - I haven't used them in a couple of years). They're expensive, but worth it for the convenience.

Same here, and it takes quite a long time to land on that page. I guess the website times out..

We are adding servers right now. In the meantime here is a short screencast of an earlier version in use: http://vimeo.com/48571832

Yup- Fail Droid.

... and I forgot to c/p the link from my tab like an idiot: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-mobile-emulator/.

This(manymo) doesn't seem primarily meant to be used for web development, but rather Android native application development. Opera's emulator is designed to emulate a mobile browser, nothing more.

yeah, we're getting a bit more traffic than expected.. bringing more servers online shortly.

I'm assuming 'this' is any emulated device and not specifically Manymo (which I haven't tried -- I keep getting the "Fail Droid"). But there are plenty: you can't test bluetooth, get network state, check battery status, and other things.

But emulators are ok to test your layouts, even though the latest ADT plugin makes it much simpler with layout previews.

The answer is: it depends. This is an android emulator - the same that Google ships with the Android SDK. A real device will probably be more responsive.

You will also have the difference of a touch based interface on a device and the emulated touch interface when using mouse-based devices (Manymo in your laptop/desktop browser.) That said, You can also use Manymo on your iPad...

In any case, having a device with the all screen size and OS version combinations does not really scale. Trying to do that gets rather expensive.

In addition to hardware capabilities and responsiveness mentioned by others, the performance data (CPU usage, memory usage, battery usage, etc) of a real device will be vastly different than the emulated version. In addition, emulators typically do not run manufacturer or carrier ROMs, meaning that the behavior on the emulator often differs from the actual device.

For testing initial layouts or on-the-fly development, emulators are fine because they offer instant local access (After the setup, of course, but who cares now that x86 emulators are so fast). For complete testing real devices are a must. That's traditionally been expensive, but there are solutions to that, such as the company I founded, AppThwack, and our competitors like TestDroid. Test locally on emulators, and test periodically on real consumer devices.

There's a reason nearly every development shop has a cupboard full of devices, and it's not because they couldn't figure out how to get a few emulators running.

Get a low-end (HTC Legend), a mid-end (HTC Desire / Moto Droid), and a high-end (Samsung Galaxy Nexus or S-II/III) device, and you are good to go. Also get a cheap tablet if you need to support that. Always develop on the lowest end device as a rule, and the optimizations you apply to make it usable on it will make the app super snappy on higher end devices. Choose Android 2.2 as your target platform and you include 96% of Android devices: http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

Always use dp instead of px, use dynamic layouts (like HTML/CSS) instead of absolute ones (like in iOS), use 9-patch or XML drawables wherever you can, don't fight the framework. Use the compatibility library for fragment support and other cool stuff, and use them wherever you can. Be careful about bitmap memory consumption, that's a gotcha on low-memory devices.

If you don't mess around with low-level stuff like NDK or OpenGL you should be good to go on the very most devices. The well-tread Java API paths are not as scary as some blogs want to make you believe. You don't have to own all the 10k devices which exist, because most of them have stock Android installed. For special cases you will receive stacktraces from people's devices in the Play dev console - or you use one of those crashlog services.

I had the same fear as you, initially. It's true that there are a lot of possible devices, versions, screen sizes etc. But in all reality, you mostly need to care about 2-3 devices.

- OS: Android 2.2/2.3 and 4.x. (Rest doesn't matter, honestly)

- Device sizes: a big/new samsung galaxy-sized one (~ 1200x700), one 320x480 and maybe a smaller one.

Depends a bit on your target demography.

This isn't actually too much worse than what you have with iOS these days, where you have retina + non-retina + tall device. (possibly + iPad). And possibly 3 iOS versions to think about - 4.3, 5.1 and 6.0.

Some of the noise you hear is precisely that. The ways in which your application can fail will depend on the sort of things it does. Generally if you follow Android best practises you will be fine. On the other hand if you pretend it is a dumb iOS device you'll have trouble. For example if you do screen layout using pixels you'll be digging a big hole.

As for testing, things can be easier. Unlike iOS provisioning profiles you can give the application package (apk) to anyone and they can sideload it onto their device (even from following a web browser link). They just have to change one setting to allow this. This means you can distribute your app for testing to friends, family and others easily. When you put the app on the Play Store you can also restrict it. If you think there could be major compatibility issues then make it available only a small subset of countries/carriers/devices and increase as you get more comfortable.

See this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erd2k6EKxCQ (22 minutes in if you want to skip the big picture) for how you can preview your UI across a multitude of languages and form factors.

There are places that let you test with devices remotely. This is especially useful if you need to check things out in other countries. One example is http://www.perfectomobile.com (not an endorsement). Samsung also has something http://developer.samsung.com/remoteTestLab.do

You can easily outsource testing too if it matters that much to you.

A good source of devices is http://swappa.com

I personally use 6 devices. G1 (Android 1.6), HTC something (Android 2.1), Droid (Android 2.2), different Droid (Android 2.3), Galaxy Tab (Android 4) and Galaxy Nexus (Android 4.1).

You can certainly start out supporting only a subset of Android versions (eg 2.3 onwards) and then based on user feedback figure out where to go next.

I guess it is part of the problem space in this case. The reason they can compete with running the emulator locally is that is it so freaking slow. There are some cases where you can speed it up, like Intel emulator images and if you are lucky hardware OpenGL support, but these don't cover all the cases you often need to test, and many developers don't know about them or don't have systems that can use them anyway. So it being difficult to run the emulator fast is the main point of pain, which is the same thing making it tough for the company to scale in this case. Makes me wonder what they are using themselves to speed things up, if anything. Intel images, x86 branch of Android, ARM servers maybe somehow? Their solution would affect their scaling/server obtaining.

We're scaled up to meet the current load now, if you want to check it out.