I hope you're all good. I am working on an android application project and I mostly use android emulator for testing the application. Android Emulator takes too much time for application loading and since I am working on the design I have to run the application after a few seconds again and again. Because of slow emulator I think my time is wasted and I can't focus on the work.
I recently tried my Galaxy Note for running application and its quite fast and running experience is much better. What I wanted to know is.. Does running eclipse project on my Phone will harm my mobile phone in any way?
Because moments back while using the phone the screen got stuck and the icons changed to different green, red and blue color. I restarted the phone and its acting normal now. But I wanted to know if it happened because of the eclipse project running on the phone? Is it safe ?
It is possible to harm your phone.
Apart from the wear and tear (YMMV) of repeatedly flashing your app to memory you may unwittingly (or otherwise) create a virus.
I've been in a situation where a thread has run amok after the app terminated and hogged the processor slowing things down. It did eventually quit though (possibly after elective rebooting). I've often had my phone restart when debugging on it. I wouldn't worry too much about that (although my domain was Samsung's bada, a lot less robust platform).
I don't see too many risks with Java apps as the language is so well managed. Native code is a risk in that, at least, a buffer overflow could place unwanted code outside of the process address space and so escape being cleaned up when the app quits. A shut down and/or force close may result from such errors.
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I am making a Flutter app that plays videos using youtube_player_flutter.
It was completed for the time being, but when I tried running it on the Android emulator, it was a behavior that clearly felt strange. Looking at Flutter performance, it was 5-10fps.
This is hopeless.
However, when I run it on the actual iPhone, there is almost no discomfort at 30-60fps.
I'm not sure what caused this difference, but I can think of it as my mac book isn't big (not high spec) and often runs out of memory.
After all, does the performance of the emulator depend on the capacity of the running computer?
So, even if this phenomenon actually occurs, if I change the computer, the performance will change, and the behavior on the actual Android device will not necessarily match the behavior on the emulator that can be confirmed at present?
I'm getting some odd (and usually random) lines come into my long-running android apps. Unfortunately I'm running Android Kitkat and I don't have some of the standard Android profiling and monitoring tools available. Also unfortunately, upgrading the OS isn't an option because it is bundled with this rather nice hardware that has an integrated barcode reader and GPIO ports.
Have you run across weird screen stuff like this before? What could be causing it? Is there a way to force garbage collection or clean the screen?
Edits: Also, we are running Teamviewer on the devices and these black marks show through on Teamviewer. Could teamviewer be the culprit?
I'm trying to build a limited-functionality Android system for our device, which needs to boot quickly, but everything we do seems to slow it down.
For example, our device has no camera, no bluetooth, no wifi, but turning them off wholesale in various /system/etc/init/*.rc files seems to actually slow it down, due to the interdependencies of Android. The services that are turned off end up restarting, or causing timeouts in Settings, for example.
(Android is on the device for its' UI, not for its connectivity abilities.)
Do you have any suggestions for how to do this? Surely Android for cars, TVs and tablets have had to deal with these issues before.
You did not specify what you did exactly, but if you tried to not start HAL services on startup they might just be started dynamically later. If you are using Android 8 or newer you could merge multiple HALs in one process. But I doubt that this will give you any significant speed-up.
Android does provide a guide on how to optimize boot times: https://source.android.com/devices/tech/perf/boot-times. However, you will notice that they focus on the bootloader, kernel, file system, SELinux, and parallelizing init. The elephant in the room is Zygote. It takes forever to start because it preloads the whole Android SDK.
From its history, Android did not care too much about startup times, because you typically do not restart Android. Instead, they rely on Suspend-to-RAM.
You should think about what you want to have your user experience early. Example: for Automotive Android, Google needs to support a rear-view camera that is available within two seconds after boot. They achieve that by a second, faster stack that provides first images before the application SDK is started and takes over. See https://source.android.com/devices/automotive/camera-hal
I have written an android app that generates a strange exception on the LG-Phone I have just started testing on. In DDMS the tag is "ISP_LOG_MW_DEBUG" and the text is "AMI_IsWindowSearch()." It is generated about 10 times per second while the app is running. It doesn't seem to interfere with the program itself, but I would rather not have this error. but I can not find any information on this on the web.
If a click the home button (the app continues running in the background) and start the app again (new UI, with the old services) the amount of these messages increases each time. So it is reasonable to assume that they are generated by something in the UI.
Has anybody experienced this error or has any idea how to avoid it?
Real devices can sometimes make a lot of noise. Sometimes the vendors just leave a lot of debugging turned on. If your app is not crashing, or showing performance issues, I would say it's safe to ignore.
Also, try with another device, or try with the emulator. If you don't see those errors with another device or the emulator, I think it's safe to say the vendor developers of the the LG device are just lazy and didn't turn off all their debugging like a good developer should. :D
db
I started developing android applications. And am testing with the android emulator. Do I really need android phone before releasing it for public usage?
Short answer No. You can test and build a android application package with the SDK and an emulator. But I would say there are usually many things which it would be wise to test on a device.
Personally I have noticed that the emulator does not give a good indication of response times for UI controls. It is usually necessary to move functionality which has long processing times into background threads to maintain user interactivity without the 'force close' pop-up. Testing the effectiveness of your UI responsiveness must be done on a phone to be meaningful.
Network connectivity is another aspect which can be vastly different on a phone, 3G or wifi.
Device sizes and Android platform versions can be tested effectively on the emulator.
Some phone allow hot-swapping of the SD card (replacing the SDcard without turning off the phone). I am not sure how to replicate this on the emulator.
There may be many more things which may only become apparent when using your application on a real device. I would strongly suggest to always test under real conditions when feasible for any commercial project.
From a technical perspective there's no reason why you can't develop purely on the emulator. You're not going to be able to test on every available device, so there's always going to be possibility of device specific bugs that you've missed.
However, I'd strongly recommend getting an actual phone to test your application on.
For me the biggest difference between an actual device and the emulator is the difference between using the interface with your fingers and using a mouse. Interactions which make sense in the emulator sometimes don't work as well when you start using touch on the screen. So if you develop purely on an emulator you'll won't lots of little improvements to your UI that would obvious when you used your app on a phone.
You can't feel a real app in your hands until you have a real phone. (I'm telling you as an Android developer)
So, developing w/o real phone is possible, but real phone gives you a lot more experience, fun & usefulness.
It depends on what type of application you're developing, for serious ones you need at least one device to test it on. For complex applications you would need a range of devices, for example with or without hardware keyboard, different navigational button etc. For basic, simple applications you'll probably do fine with just the emulator.
I would imagine with games you would definitely need to test on real devices.
Thanks to you all. I am going to get HTC Legend and test it, so that I can hope that my apps can be used by others :)
You guys suggest me HTC Desire or HTC Legend?