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Okay I am reading posts from people saying their Android SDK emulators super slow but seeing them run on Intel Celeron processors with only 1.5 GB of RAM. I get it this set up is of course not very powerful for developing Android applications. But I have an HP Pavilion g7-1365dx with an AMD A6-3600 quad cord processor with AMD Radeon HD 6520G Discrete-Class Graphics and 4 GB of RAM. While the processor was released in 2011, so fairly new technology. Someone please tell me why it takes so long to fire up Android emulators and what can be done to speed it up to an acceptable level? Note I have a multi boot system and have tried to debug android applications under Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) linux, Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows 7 Home Premium. All three operatings systems result in the same totally unacceptable development environment. I have many many changes to the UI, just an ordinary UI with buttons, linear and relative layouts, listviews, etc. No Open GL programming whatsoever in this application. The slowness in the application I noticed are HttpGet and HttpPost calls of which for all of my activities I took it upon myself to add code before all HttpGet calls something like this:

 if (debugMode) {
     Take hard coded JSON string of stock data and deserialise it instead of going to 
     the network.

     return the data without calling the network;
 }

This has the effect of circumventing the network calls just so I can populating my controls and seeing what it will look like in the emulator. Note it doesn't even get to this code because it is still trying to just launch the application So it is not my code.

Please all of you skeptics out there that do not believe me that it isn't my code. I created a totally clean Android applcation project stock from the SDK with not a single line of code of mine in it and even this takes forever (like in excess of 15 minutes).

I noticed that launching apps on real devices are lightning fast in comparison. So is it true that android application developers, in order to be effective developers just simply have to have a four or five real devices of varying screen sizes (small, normal, large and xlarge) with a few combinations of screen densities? To me I cannot see doing development on emulators as being possible. Please help. Information on this topic is limited. Yes loads of people talk about this problem, but I am seeing not a single real honest solution to this problem. As you can see my dev box is only a couple years old. So why is this such a problem?

jan_dabrowski123
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1 Answers1

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I've found that the emulators are a bit faster if you set them up with older Android images (2.x). The newer the OS, the slower the emulator is.

Unfortunately, having real hardware is the only way to be productive. I have an old phone (Galaxy S running Android 2.2), a new phone (HTC One running 4.3), and a couple of tablets, so I hope that if I get something working on all those, it will work on a wide range of other devices. It's also helpful to get beta testers with other devices.

Kristopher Johnson
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  • Thanks, you would be surprised how few people I personally know to discuss these issues with. Well that is what stackoverflow is for. :) Anyway, it seems like you arrived at the same conclusion I did but I didn't want to believe that people were spending money on multiple android devices to be productive. I was hoping I would be wrong on this. Thanks again. – jan_dabrowski123 Nov 27 '13 at 03:54
  • I've heard good things about the Genymotion emulator, but haven't tried it myself. See http://www.genymotion.com – Kristopher Johnson Nov 27 '13 at 13:00