Android Needs A Simulator, Not An Emulator

Re:Android Needs A Simulator, Not An Emulator by nailer on Tuesday June 17, 2014 @09:46AM (#7904354)

> Google really can't implement an efficient iOS simulator for them, because there's no Android desktop operating system.

The x86 Android build provided by GenyMotion (cited in the article) performs at the same speed as the x86 iPhone simulator.

It has two major issues:

- The UI is quirky (but usable)

- It's expensive

- GenyMotion devices have no Google Play by default. Want to test how your website runs in Chrome? Spend ages hacking Google Play onto the Android device.

Google could fix all of these things easily.

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Re:Android Needs A Simulator, Not An Emulator by ZoFreX on Tuesday June 17, 2014 @01:08PM (#7905574)

The x86 images provided by Google run just as fast as the Genymotion images, and have Google Play. Just FYI.

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Re:Android Needs A Simulator, Not An Emulator by nailer on Wednesday June 18, 2014 @11:53AM (#7910793)

Thanks for the suggestion. I spent an hour setting these up today - despite supposedly using x64, HAXE etc they're unusably slow. I have no idea what's wrong. The UI tools run at unacceptable latency (they're Java based) so I can't debug easily.

This is on a 2013 Haswell MBA with 8GB RAM and a 512GB SSD.

Google may as well throw the official emulator away.

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Re:Android Needs A Simulator, Not An Emulator by ZoFreX on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @11:03AM (#7938134)

When you run the emulator, do you get this message (on stdout): "HAX is working and emulator runs in fast virt mode"?

Did you enable the "Use host GPU" option?

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