As an Android developer, you must know that the Android emulator is a very powerful tool which allows you to run your Android applications on a much larger range of devices than you could ever hope to have access to. However, you will quickly realize that the emulator has one major flaw the first time you launch it, and it takes a long time to load. It is a seriously long time. However, you’re going to have to open the emulator sooner or later, despite this drawback. Nevertheless, the emulator is still the ideal way to test how your app works across multiple hardware as well as software configurations.
Although the emulator has improved in recent years, testing on it can still be frustrating, especially if you have to switch between multiple Android Virtual Devices (AVDs) all the time. Good news is, you don’t have to tear your hair out over the emulator. In this article, we will share 25 tips and tricks on how to supercharge Android Emulators. Trust us, these tricks work like a charm!
So, let us now dig deeper into the article. In order to begin, let us first understand what Android emulators are.
What are Android emulators?
Installing and running Android applications on PCs and laptops is the main function of an Android emulator. The use of emulators allows developers to test and improve their applications before they are released to the public. In contrast, emulators give them access to their favorite games on a larger screen using their computer’s higher-end specifications.
It is common for personal computers to experience technical difficulties downloading Android applications. By using these Android emulators, you can resolve all of these difficulties. Emulators are great when it comes to running the latest games on smartphones.
25 Android Emulator Hacks: A Cheat Sheet for Beginners
In this section of the blog, we will have a look at 25 hacks that can prove to be a savior, if you are a beginner in this field.
- Recent improvements to Android Studio include Instant Run, which was introduced by the Android team. No doubt you’ve been left tapping your foot while the AVD reinstalls and re-launches your project from scratch if you’ve ever installed a work-in-progress project on an AVD, made some changes, and then attempted to push the changes to the AVD. Instant Run will be a delight for you if that sounds familiar to you.
When you first hit ‘Run’ or ‘Debug’ with Instant Run enabled, Android Studio launches the emulator, loads your selected APK, and pushes it. A yellow thunderbolt icon will appear in the ‘Run’ and ‘Debug’ buttons the next time you make changes to your project.
2. In Android emulators, GPUs are faster than CPUs, so if we emulate GPUs for them, then they will surely speed up the emulator. It is disabled by default, but you can enable it if you want. Using the GPU for drawing options will allow the emulator to be faster. In fact, our emulator has two options for graphics acceleration, Software Acceleration or Hardware Acceleration. Nowadays most PCs support hardware acceleration, so GPUs are a much better option for graphics than CPUs.
Using Android SDK’s tools folder, launch the emulator via the command line and enable GPU Emulation.
3. In the Control Panel you can find the Power Options and that is where you can set up your computer’s power plan. The better the performance of your computer, the better the emulator will work.
4. In Android, two types of CPUs are supported: ARM and Intel x86. If your IDE and SDK are up to date, it is usually fairly straightforward to create an x86 AVD. The x86 system image can speed up the emulator considerably, so you’ll typically want to use it. Choose the x86 image from the ‘x86 Images’ tab in the ‘System Image’ window when creating a new AVD.
5. You can also increase the speed of your emulator using VM Acceleration. This option uses your computer’s processor and significantly improves the execution speed of your emulator. It only requires you to create a virtual machine that performs better for your emulator. To run VM acceleration on your android emulator, your computer must support any technology from Intel virtualization technology or AMD virtualization technology. Generally, most modern processors support these virtualization extensions, so you can check your processor manufacturer’s website for more information.
6. Try using an older emulator instead of the latest one if the emulator is too slow for you. A 7-year-old MBP barely supports API 30. In addition to this, you can compose works great with API 21!
7. It is important for many apps to run on Google Play (GP) services. Genymotion does not ship with GP, but you can install it yourself by installing a bundle which contains GP.
8. There are some great options in Android Studio that Google has recently added. It used to take a long time to relaunch an Android application with the Android emulator after you made some changes to its code so that you could see what changes were made to the application as a result of that code.
Each time it runs your application, it converts your entire code into machine-level language, then it launches it again. That’s why it takes so long. Google has now added a button to Android Studio to deal with this issue. By using this, your application will be executed in an emulator without much delay since it only converts new code to machine-level code. This option requires your Gradle build to be at least 2.0 by default, and your minSdkVersion must be 15 or greater. To start and stop the build, click the start and stop buttons.
9. The use of multiple programs on your computer can result in performance problems. When playing heavy games on an Android emulator, it is important to avoid using up your computer’s RAM. The removal of unwanted programs can cause severe lag on your computer. You can close unwanted programs by choosing the program from the “Task Manager”, then clicking “End task”.
10. In the previous versions of Android Studio, quick boot was not available. This feature has since been introduced, and it is extremely helpful. It starts your emulator in just six seconds. It must perform cold boot when you first start the emulator, but it will open the emulator six seconds or earlier the next time you start it. Whenever you close an emulator, it saves the state as a snapshot. When you start the emulator again, it will start your emulator fast within six seconds from where you stopped it. By the way, this functionality is now enabled by default in newer versions of android studio. It can be manually enabled if it is turned off.
11. Disabling your antivirus helps. It is a fact that when your emulator is installing and launching the application it requires access to many files at that time, so that the antivirus checks the file every time, and then grants access to the emulator, which can take a long time.
12. Geneymoton sets up two networking devices for VirtualBox, a NAT service so that the guest virtual machine can communicate with the outside world, and a “host-only” (HO) device which lets users communicate with the host machine
13. The anti-virus may be interfering with the virtualization process if you are still experiencing lags when you run LDPlayer after trying all the methods above. For instructions on configuring your anti-virus, see this article. As an example, you need to uncheck the “Enable hardware-assisted virtualization” setting in Avast.
14. After you have set up a better emulator environment, check out Couchbase Mobile Training to learn how to develop NoSQL applications.
15. If you download LeoMoon-CPU-V to check your computer, you won’t have a problem, because it will tell you whether it supports VT or not. It’s one of a number of programs on the Internet that will assist you in determining if your CPU supports hardware virtualization. It’s a completely safe program.
16. In order for your Android emulator to work properly, it is important to allocate enough RAM and CPU cores. Your emulator needs to utilize those resources to execute the apps you launch. LDPlayer can perform much better on your PC/Laptop if you change the RAM and CPU core settings. The program should resolve most issues you may be experiencing with lag and slow performance.
17. There are different ways to change the graphics settings on Windows PC depending on your graphics card. Besides upgrading graphics drivers, you can also enhance GPU performance by changing some settings.
18. You might be using the wrong GPU with your Android game on LDPlayer if it does not perform as well as you expect with your AMD or Nvidia graphics card. A notebook or a desktop computer often has two GPUs: an integrated one and a dedicated one. Your computer can use a display even without a dedicated GPU thanks to the integrated graphics chipset, built into the processo
19. The option to enable and disable Quick Boot can be found behind the Advanced Settings option in Android Virtual Device Manager when creating or editing a device.
20. Those who are more interested in app development or testing can use Android Studio to prepare, run, and test apps on their PCs. When it comes to gaming, BlueStacks, Nox, and MeMu players are the best.
21. You can easily tweak the AVD Hardware Configuration. It is less useful to experiment with this one since you can test specific hardware configurations on the Android emulator. It is also possible to increase performance if you reduce the screen size (again within reason) and increase memory (within reason).
22. A new and shiny version of Android, Kit Kat, isn’t available to everyone yet. Newer versions typically demand more hardware, so they might run faster. Go back to an older version of Android on the Android Platform Version Dashboard, or stick with Gingerbread and you will be able to support 98% of Android devices.
23. You should run your emulator on a Mac. The OpenGLES libraries run faster on Mac OS X than Windows, because Windows prefers DirectX, but OS X prefers OpenGL. If you have a Mac at your disposal, you can use the remote emulator setup for this. You should also use a computer that has a higher GPU and CPU (to use the Host GPU). Make sure you combine this tip with the previous two (to use the host GPU).
24. You might want to consider an alternative to the SDK’s emulator if you still feel frustrated by it. There are plenty of third-party Android emulators available, and Genymotion is one of the most popular.
25. LambdaTest offers the most powerful android emulator cloud for automation testing, improving apps’ performance, and debugging web and mobile applications. There’s no need to install or configure anything with LambdaTest. It is very simple to use.
Conclusion
Emulators can prove to be really helpful but you must use them carefully. We hope that you found this blog helpful. Just apply these tricks and you can ace your emulator game quite easily.
