Pro Tip: Android Emulator tool should have good integration with Android devices. It should be fast and should give a smooth gaming experience for high definition games. It should have a customization option for configurations and support external devices like keyboard, IPad, mouse or joystick for the improved user gaming experience. The Best Android Emulator for Windows: Memu. Memu is a gamer’s Android Emulator, and where most others are slow or clunky, this one is better, faster, clearer. You already have an edge when emulating your game on your PC – Memu makes it borderline unfair. The controls felt familiar and smooth (We tested PubG, Call of Duty, and Mobile Legends). The best Android emulators for gaming include LDPlayer, BlueStacks, MeMu, KoPlayer, and Nox. The second most common use case is development. Android app and game developers like to test apps. I have a problem with the Android emulator64-x86 on Mac OS X 10.11.2 comes with Android Studio 1.5. The startup task a long time a the GUI doesn't response. The task manager shows that the emulator needs up to 100% CPU. I found many question with the same scope, but nothing solve my problem. I have already installed HAXM (latest version 6.0.1). Android Emulators are a great tool to run Android Apps on PC. There are a great many Android Emulators available in the market. However, slow performance of Android Emulator can ruin that experience. Slow performance of Android Emulators is a recurrent issue, especially BlueStacks. BlueStacks is one of the most popular Android Emulators there.
The Question :
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Closed 2 years ago.
I have got a 2.67 GHz Celeron processor, and 1.21 GB of RAM on a x86 Windows XP Professional machine.
My understanding is that the Android Emulator should start fairly quickly on such a machine, but for me, it doesn’t. I have followed all the instructions in setting up the IDE, SDKs, JDKs and such and have had some success in starting the emulator quickly, but that is very rare. How can I, if possible, fix this problem?
Even if it starts and loads the home screen, it is very sluggish. I have tried the Eclipse IDE in version 3.5 (Galileo) and 3.4 (Ganymede).
- Alternate is Genymotion. genymotion.com. This is much mcuh faster. Straightforward installation.
- I have found the emulator to run way (and by way I mean waaaay) faster on linux. I’ve got a laptop with dualboot, on windows the emulator takes about 15 minutes to start up, with linux about 30 seconds. I do not know about other operating systems like OSX, but feels like a windows thing to me.
- Android Studio 2.0 is reported to not only have a much faster emulator, but employ “instant run”, which allows certain changes in your source, such as the XML, to be deployed in seconds to the target without the APK having to be rebuilt and redeployed. See android-developers.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/…
- i think your ram is very small for an emulator to run faster.
- One way of avoiding confused comments could be to have a little notice box saying the question is older than, say, 2 years old. Tech is changing rapidly, and you would want age to affect rank, even though the question shouldn’t be closed/archived as on lesser sites.
The Answer 1
Update
You can now enable the Quick Boot option for Android Emulator. That will save emulator state, and it will start the emulator quickly on the next boot.
Click on Emulator edit button, then click Show Advanced Setting. Then enable Quick Boot like below screenshot.
Android Development Tools (ADT) 9.0.0 (or later) has a feature that allows you to save state of the AVD (emulator), and you can start your emulator instantly. You have to enable this feature while creating a new AVD or you can just create it later by editing the AVD.
Also I have increased the Device RAM Size to 1024 which results in a very fast emulator.
Refer to the given below screenshots for more information.
Creating a new AVD with the save snapshot feature.
Launching the emulator from the snapshot.
And for speeding up your emulator you can refer to Speed up your Android Emulator!:
The Answer 2
IMPORTANT NOTE: Please first refer to the Intel list about VT to make sure your CPU supports Intel VT.
HAXM Speeds Up the Slow Android Emulator
HAXM stands for – “Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager”
Currently, it supports only Intel® VT (Intel Virtualization Technology).
The Android emulator is based on QEMU. The interface between QEMU and the HAXM driver on the host system is designed to be vendor-agnostic.
Steps for Configuring Your Android Development Environment for HAXM
Update Eclipse:Make sure your Eclipse installation and the ADT plug-in are fully up-to-date.
Update your Android Tools:After each Eclipse plug-in update, it is important to update your Android SDK Tools. To do this, launch the Android SDK Manager and update all the Android SDK components. To take advantage of HAXM, you must be on at least release version 17.
- Download the x86 Atom System Images and the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager Driver. Follow the image below:
Install the HAXM Driver by running “IntelHaxm.exe”. It will be located in one of the following locations:
C:ProgramFilesAndroidandroid-sdkextrasintelHardware_Accelerated_Execution_ManagerC:Users<user>adt-bundle-windows-x86_64sdkextrasintelHardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager
If the installer fails with the message that Intel VT must be turned on, you need to enable this in the BIOS. See the description for how to do this in Enabling Intel VT (Virtualization Technology) .
- Create a new x86 AVD: Follow the image below:
- Or as for new SDK,
The Answer 3
Try Android x86. It’s much faster than the Google Android emulator. Follow these steps:
- Install VirtualBox.
- Download the ISO file that you need.
- Create a virtual machine as Linux 2.6/Other Linux, 512 MB RAM, HD 2 GB. Network: PCnet-Fast III, attached to NAT. You can also use a bridged adapter, but you need a DHCP server in your environment.
- Install Android x86 on the emulator, run it.
- Press Alt+F1, type
netcfg, remember the IP address, press Alt+F7. - Run cmd on your Windows XP system, change the directory to your Android tools directory, type
adb connect <virtual_machine_IP>. - Start Eclipse, open the ADT plugin, find the device, and enjoy!
The Answer 4
UPDATE: The latest version of Android studio (2.x) made major improvements to the bundled emulator. It’s responsive and has a whole bunch of features.
For those still interested:Try using Genymotion. You can download a version for Windows/Mac OS X/Linux after registering. A plugin for Eclipse is also available:
The installation of the plugin can be done by launching Eclipse and going to “Help / Install New Software” menu, then just add a new Update Site with the following URL: http://plugins.genymotion.com/eclipse. Follow the steps indicated by Eclipse.
This emulator is fast and responsive.
GenyMotion allows you to control various sensors of your device including the battery level, signal strength, and GPS. The latest version now also contains camera tools.
The Answer 5
The emulator included in your (old) version of Eclipse is very slow.
Recent emulators are faster than they use to be in 2010. Update your SDK/IDE.
Personally, I use a real phone to do my tests. It is faster and tests are more realistic. But if you want to test your application on a lot of different Android versions and don’t want to buy several phones, you will have to use the emulator from time to time.
The Answer 6
The startup of the emulator is very slow. The good thing is that you only need to start the emulator once. If the emulator is already running and you run your app again, the emulator reinstalls the app relatively quickly. Of course, if you want to know how fast it will run on a phone, it is best to test it on a real phone.
The Answer 7
Intel released recommended installation instructions for the ICS emulator on May 15, 2012. This worked for me. The emulator is now fast and the UI is smooth.
The first half of the instructions are detailed enough, so I will assume you were able to install the Intel x86 Atom System Image(s) using the Android SDK manager, as well as Intel HAXM.
Now to ensure that everything else is set up so you can enjoy a highly performing emulator:
And start it:
If HAXM is working properly, you may see this message when launching the emulator:
HAX is working and emulator runs in fast virtual mode
Otherwise, you may see this error:
HAX is not working and the emulator runs in emulation mode emulator:
Failed to open the hax module
Use GPU emulation. You cannot use the Snapshot option when using GPU emulation as of this writing. Ensure that GPU emulation is set to “yes”.
Set the device memory to 1024 MB or more, but not more than the Intel HAXM setting. I use 1024 MB per device and 2048 for HAXM.
Always double-check the settings after saving! The emulator is very picky about what it allows you to set, and it will revert configurations without telling you.
With these settings the software keyboard no longer appears, nor do the on-screen back, menu, and recent keys. This appears to be a limitation of the current ICS Intel x86 system image. You will need to use the keyboard shortcuts.
On Mac OS you will need to hold fn + control for the F1 – F12 keys to work. Page up/down/left/right can be performed using control + arrow keys.
The Answer 8
You can create emulator.bat with following command to start the emulator. It will start faster.
Or on Unix (Mac or Linux flavors):
The Answer 9
I’ve noticed that the emulator starts much faster if there’s no Dalvik Debug Monitor Server (DDMS) connected. So if you start the emulator from Virtual Device Manager “SDK Setup.exe” and Eclipse is not started, the emulator works faster.
If you start the emulator from Eclipse: DDMS is there, so sometimes the emulator is extremely slow, but sometimes it’s faster.
The Answer 10
Mac Os Android Emulator
Emulators are slow. There’s really nothing you can do about it, but there are alternatives to the emulator.
To make your emulator faster, you can host a GPU and use a lighter Android version (Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)).Developing on a Mac would be better. Why use an emulator, BTW? Using a real phone makes more sense.
The Answer 11
As of Revision 17 of Android SDK Tools, the emulator can use graphic acceleration and CPU-provided extensions for better efficiency. The prerequisites and full configuration and user notes are at:
For enabling GPU aceleration, run the emulator from the command line or add “-gpu on” to the additional emulator command line options in the AVD configuration.
For using the CPU machine extensions, you have to install the driver (caution because it can conflict with existing VirtualBox or VMware drivers). Once it’s installed it will be used automatically whenever you use an x86-based AVD.
The Answer 12
Try to disable your antivirus. Maybe it will make emulator a little bit faster.
The Answer 13
Android SDK rev. 17 supports Virtual Machine Acceleration using AMD and Intel virtualization technologies.
This feature can improve the emulator performance a lot!
See the following section in the Android emulator documentation for more details: Configuring Virtual Machine Acceleration
Don’t forget to install the appropriate driver for your operating system:
After you have installed the drivers and downloaded an Android X86 system image (as described in the documentation) you should be able to create a new AVD using the x86 image:
For example:
- Target: Intel Atom x86 System Image – API Level 10
- CPU/ABI: Intel Atom (x86)
The Answer 14
The option -cpu-delay <delay> described in Emulator Startup Options can help.
The Answer 15
The emulator seems to slow itself down when idle. This is made apparent by rapidly mousing over the keys on the side and observing the light-up responses. As a workaround, I pass -icount auto to QEMU when starting the emulator. You can make a batch file called my_avd.bat to do it for you:
@my_avd— launch a virtual device named ‘my_avd’-no-boot-anim— disable animation for faster boot-qemu args...— pass arguments to qemu-icount [N|auto]— enable virtual instruction counter with 2^N clock ticks per instruction
This made animations buttery smooth and sped up adb install tenfold.
The Answer 16
Android emulator release 9 has a new “snapshot” feature. You can save the state of the emulator (make an image of the emulator) and avoid booting when you start the emulator.
The Answer 17
You can review the emulator issues on the Google I/O 2011: Android Development Tools talk, starting a 0:40:20.
The emulator runs slowly because the complete Android environment is running on emulated hardware and the instructions are executed on an emulated ARM processor as well.
The main choking point is rendering since it’s not running on any dedicated hardware but it’s actually being performed through software rendering. Lowering the screen size will drastically improve emulator performance. Getting more/faster memory isn’t going to help.
They’ve mentioned, at the time, that they’re developing an interface that would allow the emulator to pipe certain instructions through the host hardware, so eventually, you’ll be able to leverage emulator performances with the raw power of desktop hardware.
The Answer 18
The current (May 2011) version of the emulator is slow particularly with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) primarily because the emulator does not support hardware GL — this means that the GL code gets translated into software (ARM software, in fact) which then gets emulated in software in QEMU. This is crazy-slow. They’re working on this problem and have it partially solved, but not with any sort of release quality.
Check out the video Google I/O 2011: Android Development Tools to see it in action — jump to about 44 minutes.
The Answer 19
Use the Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator
First, install the Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM). This can be downloaded directly from Intel or using Android SDK Manager. In the SDK Manager, it’s located under Extras.
In the version of Android Studio I used (0.8.9), Android SDK Manager downloads HAXM but doesn’t actually run the installer (I assume this will be fixed in later releases). To run the installer I had to go to C:Program Files (x86)Androidandroid-studiosdkextrasintelHardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager and manually launch intelhaxm.exe.
HAXM works with Intel devices, so created a new Emulator with Intel CPU.
Create a new AVD using Intel Atom x86
This improved things considerably, but the emulator was still feeling a bit sluggish. The final step was selecting Use Host GPU in Android Virtual Device Manager (AVD).
After these changes, Android Emulator was launching in 5-10 seconds and running without any noticeable lag.Be aware that these features are hardware dependent (CPU/GPU) and may not work on some systems.
The Answer 20
Try Genymotion for Android Studio. Blazing fast! Just needs one time installation. No more AVD pain.
The Answer 21
A new option is the Visual Studio Emulator for Android–it’s fast, Hyper-V, x86, and free to download even without VS.
The Answer 22
To add further information to this.
I have recently upgraded my Ubuntu installation to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) which in turn updated my Java version to:
And now the emulator (although takes a while to start) seems to be running faster than previously.
It might be worth people upgrading their JVM.
The Answer 23
Here’s what I noticed nobody mentioned it at all.
Assign all available processors to the emulator
Here’s what you can try. It does speed up the emulator for me, especially during loading time. I noticed the emulator is only using a single core of the available CPU. I set it to use all available processors.
I’m using Windows 7.
When the Android emulator is starting, open up the Task Manager, look under the Process tab, look for “emulator-arm.exe” or “emulator-arm.exe *32″… Right click on it, select Processor Affinity and assign as much processor as you like to the emulator.
The Answer 24
After developing for a while, my emulator became brutally slow. I chose wipe user data, and it was much much better. I am guessing that it takes time to load up each APK file you’ve deployed.
The Answer 25
Android emulator is dead slow. It takes 800MB memory while running.If you are on Windows, You can use Microsoft Android Emulator. It is superb, provides you functionalities more than Android Studio Emulator. And most important it is fast ( consumes 13MB only).It comes with Visual Studio 2015 Technical Preview. I am using it and happy with it. I downloaded and installed entire VS pack, I need to look how we can install VS Emulator only.
EDIT:Try https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/msft-android-emulator/
The Answer 26
Well, since somebody suggested Android x86 as an alternative testing emulator, I’ll also present my favorite. 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 fluid and fast. Sometimes it is even faster than a normal device. The only downside 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
After compiling, it installs instantly. It is very impressive, considering I have rather an average computer hardware (dual core with 4 GB of RAM).
The Answer 27
I had intermittent slow emulator (SDK v8.0) load times, up to three minutes on Intel Core i7 920 2.67 GHz CPU running on Xubuntu 10.04 VirtualBox 3.2.12 guest with Eclipse (3.6.1) loaded. I changed the VirtualBox guest memory from 1024 MB to 2048 MB and from that point on, I never experienced the slowness again (load times consistent at 33 seconds, CPU load consistent at 20%). Both Eclipse and the emulator are memory hogs.
The Answer 28
I noticed that the my emulator (Eclipse plugin) was significantly slowed by my Nvidia graphics card anti-aliasing settings. Removing 2x anti aliasing from the graphics menu and changing it to application controlled made it more responsive. It is still slow, but better than it used to be.
The Answer 29
To reduce your emulator start-up time you need to check the “Disable Boot Animation” before starting the emulator. Refer to the Android documentation.
If in case you don’t know, you do not need to close the emulator every-time you run/debug your app. If you click run/debug when it’s already open, your APK file will get uploaded to the emulator and start pretty much immediately. Emulator takes annoyingly long time only when it started the first time.
Here are some tips to speed up the Android emulator: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%.
The Answer 30
Good way to speed up Android Emulator and app testing is Install or Upgrade your Android Studio to Android Studio 2.0 version and then go to app open Settings/Preferences, the go to Build, Execution, Deployment → Instant Run. Click on Enable Instant Run. And After That This will ensure you have the correct gradle plugin for your project to work with Instant Run.
And Instant run will look like this
However Android Studio is right now in Preview you can try it now.
Testing on multiple mobile devices is costly, time consuming and the default Android emulator is notoriously slow. So, what should we do? That's easy - start using a properly fast Android emulator.
When developing Android applications, you have to keep in mind all the different Android OS versions and various screen sizes and resolutions. The main objective before releasing an application is to find bugs and design imperfections.
Default Android emulator
The great thing about using an emulator for development is that it gives you an opportunity to develop applications without having a real Android device. The default Android emulator comes together with the Android SDK and can be found in the 'tools' folder.
So far so good, we have our cake, but can we eat it? The answer comes about 5 minutes after we hit the 'Launch' button. Go grab a coffee. Have breakfast. Come back. Wait another 5 minutes. Maybe even more.
Finally - the emulator launches, only to show how slow it actually is.
All these performance problems stem from the fact that it emulates an ARM processor so it can run the actual code of your application. It accomplishes that by providing dynamic binary translation of the device machine code to the OS and processor architecture of your development machine.
Basically, it does a lot of mumbo-jumbo to pretend it's an ARM processor - when actually it isn't.
OK, it's slow. So what can we do about it?
- Well, first, we can help our CPU out by delegating the rendering process to the GPU by checking 'Use Host GPU' checkbox in AVD's edit window. The screen should now look better and be more responsive. That's because the CPU is not dealing with the tedious work of doing rendering anymore. But, that's still not fast enough.
- We can download Intel Atom (x86) images and, while we're at it, download Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM, for Mac and Windows only). This will enable virtual machine acceleration capabilities of the Intel CPU (for more information check this link).
Now we're getting somewhere, once this baby starts up, it should run fast and smooth.
S60 3rd Edition Emulator
You could say that this level of speed should be sufficient. That may be true, but an issue with the Intel x86 images is that you don't get Google Apps, they only come with ARM images. This is important if you're testing an app that uses GMaps, or Google Play Services.
So, as we've seen, ARM images aren't fast enough even with hardware acceleration. And emulators don't have the Play Store. What now?
Genymotion by Genymobile
Genymotion is a new, fast Android emulator developed by the French company Genymobile. It's based on the open-source project AndroVM, and the first beta version was released back in June.
It runs on all major platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux). For now it's freely available, but there is also going to be a paid version.
According to AndroVM blog, the free version will be feature-rich, and the paid version will be intended for large companies needing a higher level of collaboration on Genymotion.
How to use it?
Genymotion relies on Oracle VirtualBox to work (version 4.1 or above). So...
Download and install VirtualBox. For Windows users it's not necessary to install VirtualBox separately, because it is available from the Genymotion site, bundled with the Genymotion emulator.
Go to Genymotion website and sign up. You'll receive a validation mail, so just click on the validation link to proceed.
Download and install the Genymotion emulator (the current version is 1.1.0).
Start Genymotion. You might need to configure path to your Android SDK location in Genymotion settings (probably if you've installed SDK in a non default location). Since this is a first start, there are no devices. Click on 'Add' and download new device. To see available devices, write your credentials in the pop-up dialog and click 'Connect'.
Select the device and click 'Start'.
It starts quickly and is insanely fast! It's a little awkward to start the emulator separately, but Genymotion provides Eclipse and Android Studio integration through plugins, also available on Genymotion website. To use the plugin, you have to provide a path to Genymotion installation and Android SDK, as well.
OK, it's fast. Is that it?
Well, for me, the sheer speed of Genymotion is what got me using it in the first place. Which is kind of funny, because in the first version you couldn't even rotate the device.
But, alongside the speed bump, it also provides GPS, compass and battery control via some good-looking widgets.
Battery control widget
The GPS widget even provides GMaps for selecting mock locations, which is really nice for testing location based apps.
Device angle control and Play Store
Through the Genymotion shell it's also possible to control the device's angle (accelerometer), but it would be cool to control it using a widget, something like the Windows phone emulator does.
Genymotion devices with Google Apps also come with the Play Store preinstalled. This comes in handy if you want to test an app from the Play Store quickly.
Multiple screen sizes
Multiple screen sizes are one of Android developer's worst nightmares. There is a huge number of different screen configurations of Android devices.
Genymotion, as well as the default emulator, offers custom configuration of device's screen. In the list of available devices, select the device for which you want to change screen configuration and click on the monitor icon on the right side. Then simply select one of the predefined screen resolutions or create your own.
Be careful when choosing resolution, because you may end up with something rather strange…
Where it comes short
The main setback of Genymotion is that it only provides devices with API version 16, 17 and a preview version of Android 4.3 (API 18). If we take a look at Google Dashboard, we'll see that Gingerbread still holds about 33% of all devices (API 10).
So, for testing on that platform you still need either a default emulator or real device, which kind of defeats the purpose of Genymotion as a testing platform.
And there is no camera, which I don't miss, but could be really useful.
In the future, we can expect even more features, like taking screenshots or video screen capturing (which would be great for making demonstration videos). An accelerometer widget would be cool, and even a camera would be nice, but we can only wait and see.
Final thoughts
Well, you can never really get rid of real devices, because you'll always want to test an app on a real device before releasing it. But during development I recommend using a Genymotion emulator. Even though it doesn't cover all major Android OS versions. It's fast, stable, the GPS sensor manipulation is awesome and with the device rotation feature added to the 1.1.0 version - it's truly the way to go.
Also, deploying apps is almost instant and that can save you a lot of time when you're doing small changes to the app. But you have to watch out since the Genymotion emulator runs faster than real devices themselves, giving you a false impression of the performance of the app.
Always test on a real device!
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