Is there any way to lower android emulator performance so I can see what will happen when a user with slow device uses my application?
You can find different cellular networks in emulator settings, such as Full, LTE, EDGE, etc. The signal strength can also be changed.
Changing that would give you an idea of how your app behaves.
You may also change some emulator GPU or RAM settings (-gpu <value>, -no-accel, -lowram, etc.) and use ARM images instead of x86 to force slower emulation but their help understanding how you app experience would be on a slower device might be limited.
Finally, you can also pass options to qemu (see the list running emulator -qemu -h).
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I am using Android Studio, my system does not support emulator and I don't have any android phone but I want run android application. Is it possible to run android application without emulator and android phone?
You will always need to deploy your applications on Android OS which is only possible on an emulator or Android-phone when developping native-apps. If you're developing hybride applications, you can run your app in a browser and use browser-plugins to simulate the native features of your device. Please keep in mind that there is more than 1 emulator available for Android. The emulator in Android Studio is one of the slowest available. Try using genymotion or BlueStacks, but preferably, Genymotion.
There are different emulators. You can try installing Genymotion. You need an emulator or an android phone to run your app
No. It does not make sense that you would be able to do so, every application for any device needs a platform to run on!
More importantly, why do you say your system does not support emulators? There are many free emulators available online, I personally recommend you try Genymotion.
UPDATE: My guess is that the error you are getting is due to your computer hardware not supporting multiple CPUs such as those found in modern android phones. It might be possible to turn on hardware virtualization in your computer BIOS (usually you press F2 or some such when you are booting up - but this depends on your particular hardware).
The very first thing I would try before anything else is to download Genymotion (as it was also recommended by the other answers), and at least one other emulator before giving up. Have you tried any other emulator other than the default one that comes with Android Studio? Different emulators likely work differently and they might not need hardware virtualization.
If you are unable to use the HAXM based emulator or Genymotion, you are better off buying a handset device.
Otherwise you are limited to running the ARM based emulation which in the SDK manager looks like 'ARM EABI v7a System Image'. The ARM based emulation should be used with GPU acceleration enabled. Best possible performance would be to use the smallest screen possible such as 480x320, 800x480 or 854x480. The larger the screen in terms of pixels, the worse the performance.
Again the best recommendation is to get a Android phone/tablet and do your development there.
Is there a way to take an image of an android system running on phone and run it on emulator?
I have a client with a certain bug on his phone and I want to be able to take a snapshot or an image of the Android and run it on the emulator to debug it freely without the need to take the phone from the client cause the problem seems to happen only on his phone.
You can't do what you want for a couple reasons. For one, getting the ROM image off the phone wouldn't be a trivial matter. In fact, I can't really think of a way to do it at all. Unless this is a Nexus phone or something where the manufacturer has made the images available for download, manufacturers generally don't want you mucking about with system images.
The more important reason is that the software running on a phone expects to be conntected to the physical hardware of the phone: the processor and chipset, the GPU, all the input and output devices, sensors, and so forth. The ROM image has device drivers that talk to all of that. For that image to work in an emulator, the emulator would have to emulate all of those devices well enough to fool the device drivers, which is a very complex thing, and that environment doesn't exist anywhere -- even manufacturers don't emulate their hardware to that extent when developing it. Much of that hardware and device driver environment is manufacturer-proprietary, so it would be impossible (or legally difficult) for someone other than the manufacturer to make that possible.
The Android emulator has a specific kernel image with device drivers tuned to its software emulation environment; what it's got is designed specifically for that environment. The other side of the equation is also true: you couldn't take an emulator system image and get it running on a physical device.
In your case, I would suggest you to upload your apk file to testfairy, then you can have the option to trace user's activity with your app, and it also have an error log that might even more useful.
When I am starting the AVD from Android Studio, it shows a black blank screen for a LONG time and I do not see the home screen. I looked at a couple of Stack Overflow posts (Virtual Machine Acceleration for Android Emulator and Android emulator system images and AMD processor) from pre-2013 which suggested that it is because of AMD processor (which I am using) and which does not allow installation for HAXM.
I just want to know that since 2013 has there been a solution to this problem (either from AMD or Google)? Or else what is the alternative apart from Genymotion?
PS: In some example on the net I have seen the same blank screen but with a keyboard on the right, below the arrow controls.
PS: AVD does not even work when I select "Intel Atom x86" or deselect "Use Host GPU".
From memory, I think HAXM only works with Intel chipset, not AMD. (I have AMD, too!).
Genymotion is a good alternative to Android stock AVD, in terms of speed and startup. However, Genymotion does not support some API levels. So, depends on your requirement, you may need to use both Genymotion and the Android stock AVD to test for different Android API levels.
Also, with stock Android AVD, have a look at this link to see other parameters that you can provide when running an AVD. In particular, the -debug-all parameter can show debug logs that can help troubleshoot problems with an AVD. Unless you're testing sound for an app, there's no point loading audio support for an AVD. You can disable audio support by supplying the -noaudio parameter.
It is very likely that 512 MB is not enough to properly emulate an xhdpi device. Try increasing the emulated RAM to at least 1024 MB and see if you can boot properly.
First of all, you need to know that I have a very powerful computer so that's not the problem.
I tried making a black screen without anything on it but an FPS counter, with OpenGL and Canvas, but the app doesn't go over 10-11 FPS.
I am just lost, I don't know what the problem is, I checked and it's not the render or the update function...
thanks for the help.
I am on windows 7 64 bit BTW.
8 years later and i have the answer.
open the AVD manager, scroll down to emulated performance, change it from "Automatic" to "Hardware - GLES 2.0", if still not performing show the advanced settings and set it to "Cold boot" this changed it from like 8-12 fps to a solid 30 fps non stop.
I'm more inclined to say that it is a fault of the Emulator than your system. It is extremely slow for me as well, even doing general app debugging. Not surprised on your frame rate. The Intel x86 Image might make a difference, but I usually don't see much improvement even with that.
You can create x86 virtual machine.
See
Android-x86 - Porting Android to x86
ISO image
I've found that I get better performance out of the Emulator when I set the processor afinity to all through Windows Task Manager
Here are some tips which can speed up the emulator significantly :
Give 1GB of RAM (or even more) to your AVD. Don't try to emulate the amount of RAM of a real device, it is generally useless and can amazingly slow down the emulator.
Emulate Android 2.3.3, which boots and runs faster on the emulator than the previous and next versions (by the way, never emulate Android 2.1 or 2.2 if you use SQLite databases. The SQLite implementation was very slow even on real devices).
Don't use high screen resolutions and densities unless for final testing. Use the smallest resolution available and set the LCD density to something low (in the mdpi range).
Well, this might not be an alternative for everyone but for me it's perfect! Use the Bluestacks Player. it runs Android 2.3.4 and is very fluent and fast. Sometimes even faster than a normal device. The only downsize is, that you can just test Apps on the API Level 10 and just on one screen size, but it's perfect just for testing if it's working or not. Just connect the Player with the adb by running
adb connect 127.0.0.1
(Its always the same IP adress)
The Android virtual device (a simulated Android environment) doesn't run very smoothly on my machine. Scrolling is quite sluggish.
Is that normal?
EDIT: Just noticed that a AVD running Android 1.6 has a significantly better performance compared to the AVDs running on 2.1 and 2.2.
Its normal unless you have like 4GB of RAM, an SSD, and a good processor. Out of all those, RAM is probably the most important though since your basically running a VM(Virtual Machine) on a VM.
If you have a dedicated GPU on your machine, you can enable GPU acceleration on the AVD to make the graphics-related processing, such as animations etc, much faster. It is NOT enabled by default, and the developers page even said that it might not be compatible with every GPU out there, but it is worth a try. You can enable it by editing your AVD, and in the hardware section click "New", add "GPU emulation", and set it to "yes".
This is also assuming you have enough RAM. 4GB is sufficient to run eclipse + the Jellybean AVD (with WXGA720 resolution) on Ubuntu 12.04 Unity. I still have 800 MB of free RAM (I do not have swap space).