Google Improves Performance of Android Emulator

Android developers have a powerful tool at their disposal, the Android emulator. The Android SDK ships with the image of an Android system, which allows you to test applications on the OS without needing a phone.

This is different from something like BlueStacks, which allows running Android applications on Windows. The Android emulator even simulates the ARM architecture of most Android phones, which means a more accurate emulation of the phone environment. Some applications, such as Mozilla Firefox for Mobile have binary components that are compiled for ARM, and those applications will just not work on something like BlueStacks. They will however work on the Android SDK’s Qemu-based emulator.

Of course this emulation comes at the price of performance — which can often be quite poor. The emulator can take minutes to boot into the OS, and the overall experience is sluggish. The good news is, this is exactly what Google is trying to fix.

The latest Android image that Google has release for the emulator adds support for the GPU, thus not only taking better use of your hardware in running the emulation, but also enabling the testing of OpenGL-based applications on the emulator. This would allow the testing of complex games without a device.

An x86 port for Android is also available, which can use useful in testing normal Android apps that don’t have native components.