Fast Android emulator using VirtualBox | Hacker News Reader

Fast Android emulator using VirtualBox

infinum.co

144 pointsreisub21 comments

Genymotion is a breath of fresh air for Android development, much needed.

Recording screencasts is a big win. It was previously too slow using emulators or screen cappers. There are a few Android apps that do it directly on the device, but you have to root it to run them!

Also, it's great for co-workers who don't have an Android device. e.g. we're porting to iOS app right now, and the iOS developer can see Android features without having an Android device.

Their web page doesn't bring so much information about price? if it will cost money I hope Google will acquire it and make it free.

As I see, it's free, but you have to register in order to download Genymotion.

The core is open-source and available on GitHub [1], but seems to be scattered across a number of repositories. Not clear if it's buildable purely from the repository currently (I haven't tried).

It was previously an independent open-source project, AndroVM [2], which Genymobile acquired, but they agreed to keep the core open-source [3].

[1] https://github.com/androvm

[2] http://androvm.org/

[3] http://androvm.org/blog/blog/2013/05/16/androvm-moving-to-a-...

>Recording screencasts is a big win. It was previously too slow using emulators or screen cappers

But can you use any screen capture software for the emulators?

For speed, nothing beats Genymotion. If also want to test the latest android, I found installing the latest Android-x86 image under virtualbox to be painless. If you want to run ARM code, be sure to install the Intel ARM translator. There are also several very fast Windows options too, such as Windroy[2], YouWave[3], and BlueStacks[4]. All of these solutions run faster than the official android emulator.

[1] http://www.android-x86.org/documents/virtualboxhowto

[2] http://www.socketeq.com/

[3] http://youwave.com/

[4] http://www.bluestacks.com/

Is this really faster than the standard Android Emulator with an android-x86 image and QEMU-KVM + GPU acceleration?

Genymotion is absolutely amazing. Not only is it super fast but also has images with Google Apps, which are almost impossible to get on an emulator.

The downside of using Genymotion is that it's so fast it will hide a lot of performance issues that you will see when running on an actual device. So please, test early and often on actual hardware with extreme amounts of data.

+1 to your performance advice - my x86 images (both through 'emulator' and Genymotion) are actually faster than a real phone.

For performance testing I recommend using a Galaxy Ace (actually using - install some apps, fill it up with data) and testing your app on it. If it's fast on that it'll be fast on just about anything!

Shouldn't Google acquire them already? It's surprising and quite unnatural to see other companies make faster emulators than Google themselves (which may not be because Google doesn't have the technical expertise to do it, but because they're not that seriously committed to doing that, and they think the current emulator is fast enough).

Yes, I wish they would, but if they really cared about boosting Android performance, picking up Myriad for their Dalvik Turbo would be a better choice. It's 2-3x faster[1] closing the huge performance gap between Google's JIT and Oracle's.[2]

Looking over the changelog from Android 2.2-4.3, there's no mention of performance tweaks to Dalvik. They even have the father of JIT, Lars Bak, working for them. But he's focused on the V8 JS engine and doesn't provide any assistance with Android.[3]

[1] http://androidandme.com/2010/02/news/myriad-dalvik-turbo-boo...

[2] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2388956

[3] http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califor...

> They even have the father of JIT, Lars Bak, working for them. But he's focused on the V8 JS engine and doesn't provide any assistance with Android.

He's also one of the leads on the Dart VM [1], but that likely just leaves even less time for involvement in anything Java/Android.

[1] http://www.dartlang.org/

It looks like they are working on their tools. I've came across this a few days ago

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-M-dRek8oKjCT0pq7fFlC7DfFGW...

Am I the exception here? I've always found the qemu x86 images fast enough (with kvm support in the kernel). Genymotion doesn't feel particularly faster than the standard x86 images.

Could this be a non-Linux phenomenon?

I think I'll benchmark it in the near future!

My understanding is that one of the original ideas behind Android and its API levels was that anyone could implement the Android API to run Android apps.

Doing exactly this to build a simulator would seem an obvious step. No virtualisation necessary, good performance, and good enough for the majority of use cases.

Genymotion looks interesting... but they only allow alphanumeric characters in your password? What the ...

And they force you to have at least one numeric.

Someone spent time and effort implementing this, thinking it must be a good idea. Why?

Is it free? How much does it cost if not? I can't find any info on their website

It's free, you just have to sign up to get it. I believe they are planning to offer a paid version in the future, but that will be alongside the free version. http://androvm.org/blog/blog/2013/05/16/androvm-moving-to-a-... has more info.

Thanks, not only it's fast but easy to install and user friendly.

Genymotion really speeds up development, apps deploy on it in seconds!

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