Turbo Charging the Android Emulator

Ah, the good ol’ Android Emulator….Many a support request has come in regarding this, mainly to complain of how dog slow it can be especially in comparison to the iOS simulator.

The main reason for the speed difference between both is that the Android “Emulator” is physically emulating the software and hardware of actual devices whereas the iOS “simulator” is only simulating the iOS operating system and has full access to all of the system resources (e.g. CPU, GPU etc)

With the above in mind, an Android Emulator is good if you’re starting with Android development or if you are in a pinch but ideally testing your application on a physical device gives you the best experience and doesn’t leave you wanting to pull your hair out.

With that being said, there is an alternative “Emulator” that I have used in the past and it has also recently been brought to our attention via support (Thanks Fulvio), which provides far superior performance compared to Google’s “out of the box” Emulator.

The software in question is Genymotion and is available to download from:

http://www.genymotion.com/

There are many versions available, but the Free version should provided you with everything you need to get testing your apps at super speed!

Now, its not a simple case of installing Genymotion and off you go, there are few things required in order to make this emulator work with a LiveCode built Android App. In order to save you from throwing your computer off the wall, I will now go through the GenyMotion setup step-by-step 🙂

Here we go:

1. The first thing you will want to do is download Genymotion and install it on your system.  

2. Genymotion runs an emulator within a Virtual machine with Virtualbox being the software that it uses for this purpose. So, the next thing to do is head over to https://www.virtualbox.org/ then download and install the latest release of Virtualbox.

3. We are now at a stage where we can run the Genymotion executable, so let’s do this.

Once launched, it will present you with the following screen. Select “yes”:

4. You will now be presented with the “Virtual Device Creation Wizard”. In order to create a new device, you will need to sign in with your Genymotion account. After you have signed-in, you will be presented with a list of emulator copies of all of the latest Android Devices.

5. For simplicity, I am going to create an emulator using the first option of “Custom Phone- 4.4.1-API 16 768 x 1280”. So I select this, and press “Next”. This then allows me to name my emulator, I leave the name as its default value and press “next” again. This will then proceed to download this emulator for use:

If all goes as expected, a “The virtual device has been successfully created” message screen will appear:

6. After the device is created, press “Finish”. This will take you back to the “Your devices” screen. From here, you can select your device and press “Start”:

7. After around 10 seconds of loading ( Retina MacBookPro), the emulator is up and running and oh my…..is it fast!

8. Now fire up LiveCode, and if you already have this setup for Android development and have a stack open which has its deployment platform set to Android, you should see the Genymotion emulator in the list of “Test Targets”..so good, so far 🙂

9. Now…try to deploy your stack to the emulator… uh oh….”Houston, we have a problem”

The error that occurs in the emulator is due to the incompatible architecture that a LiveCode built Android APK uses. LiveCode builds ARM based Android standalones (as around 99% of Android devices use this architecture) whereas, Genymotion is built on x86 architecture.

Don’t worry, I haven’t strung you along and there is a solution to this which involves installing an ARM translation library. All of this is explained in the following XDA developer post-

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2528952

With the main steps we need being 1 – 4

So basically, you have to download the ARM translation installer zip, drag it onto the Genymotion emulator, accept the flash and restart the emulator after the flashing has finished. (to restart, simply quit the emulator and re-launch)

10. Now if everything has went as planned, you should now be able to deploy to the emulator from within LiveCode 🙂

TAADAA! Here we have Sheepherder running in Genymotion with the performance being on par with any physical device.

Thats it! I hope you find this useful when it comes to testing your LiveCode Android Apps along with making  your Android development a more enjoyable,fun and stress free experience 🙂

Please let us know how you get on in the comments below or if you have any other emulator related tip/tricks