Genymotion relies on Oracle VirtualBox to work (version 4.1 or above). For now it's freely available, but there is also going to be a paid version.Īccording to AndroVM blog, the free version will be feature-rich, and the paid version will be intended for large companies needing a higher level of collaboration on Genymotion. It runs on all major platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux). It's based on the open-source project AndroVM, and the first beta version was released back in June. Genymotion is a new, fast Android emulator developed by the French company Genymobile. So, as we've seen, ARM images aren't fast enough even with hardware acceleration. This is important if you're testing an app that uses GMaps, or Google Play Services. That may be true, but an issue with the Intel x86 images is that you don't get Google Apps, they only come with ARM images. You could say that this level of speed should be sufficient. Now we're getting somewhere, once this baby starts up, it should run fast and smooth. This will enable virtual machine acceleration capabilities of the Intel CPU (for more information check this link).

We can download Intel Atom (x86) images and, while we're at it, download Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM, for Mac and Windows only).

That's because the CPU is not dealing with the tedious work of doing rendering anymore. The screen should now look better and be more responsive.

Well, first, we can help our CPU out by delegating the rendering process to the GPU by checking 'Use Host GPU' checkbox in AVD's edit window.

It accomplishes that by providing dynamic binary translation of the device machine code to the OS and processor architecture of your development machine.īasically, it does a lot of mumbo-jumbo to pretend it's an ARM processor - when actually it isn't. Maybe even more.įinally - the emulator launches, only to show how slow it actually is.Īll these performance problems stem from the fact that it emulates an ARM processor so it can run the actual code of your application. So far so good, we have our cake, but can we eat it? The answer comes about 5 minutes after we hit the 'Launch' button. The default Android emulator comes together with the Android SDK and can be found in the 'tools' folder.

The great thing about using an emulator for development is that it gives you an opportunity to develop applications without having a real Android device. The main objective before releasing an application is to find bugs and design imperfections. When developing Android applications, you have to keep in mind all the different Android OS versions and various screen sizes and resolutions. So, what should we do? That's easy - start using a properly fast Android emulator. Testing on multiple mobile devices is costly, time consuming and the default Android emulator is notoriously slow.

How to start an android emulator mac