

Ask HN: Why is the Android emulator so slow? - pshapiro

Coming from an iOS mobile development background, the Android emulator is ridiculously slow. Anyone know why it's like that?
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orangecat
The iOS "emulator" actually isn't; it's running native x86 code including all
system frameworks. That makes it much faster than the Android emulator which
has to fully emulate an ARM CPU.

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georgemcbay
This is correct but kind of just shifts the question to "Why doesn't Google do
the same for Android?", particularly now that the Honeycomb SDK is out because
the Android SDK emulator running Honeycomb is so slow as to be completely
unusable even on my quad-core desktop system.

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saidulislam
do what same for Android? go native? haven't tried honeycomb but if it's that
slow I say post it as an issue to android dev

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georgemcbay
Go native for the dev "emulator" is what I meant, just like Apple does for the
iOS SDK.

All of the tools the Android SDK uses to build APKs (even NDK ones) support
x86 as a target and Android itself will run on x86. There are certainly some
apps that require ARM specific (eg. NEON) instruction sets but those are in
the vast minority compared to the whole of the Android App ecosystem and
Honeycomb running on an emulated ARM isn't really a solution for even those
folks, the emulator is basically useless for everyone now.

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andrewtbham
It is slow... one thing you can do is hook up a real phone to your computer
and use it in place of the emulator.

another thing is... are you stopping and starting the emulator every time you
do a new build? I was at first, but it's way faster to leave the emulator
running. Then just run or debug and it will start in the current running
emulator.

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saidulislam
yes, it is slow when you start it up first time 'cause it has to load all the
dependencies and stuff but it's not so bad once it starts up and when you test
something. having more memory helps a lot. try it.

