I\'m playing with Android development, but the emulator is sooo... slow... It ta
ID: 661824 • Letter: I
Question
I'm playing with Android development, but the emulator is sooo... slow... It takes upwards of five minutes just to start up!
I'm not interested enough in Android development to continue pursuing it with such a slow virtual device (and I don't really want to go buy a real device).
Is there a faster emulator? I'm looking for something that will integrate nicely with Eclipse and run on OS X, and also provide abilities to test on different screen sizes and OSes.
By faster I mean more responsive with a shorter bootup time.
Explanation / Answer
You can install Android in a virtual box environment on your local machine. This is usually done in order to allow the emulation of for example Google Maps-based applications which does not run in the emulato for licening reasons. The other advantage of this installment is that you only have to boot Android once and then hot-deploy your app after each change. There are plenty of tutorials on the net.
As far as I know, this does however not come with ny direct IDE support. Instead, you have to deploy your app as if you installed it on a real device.