Can the android emulator run on an ARM device

Question

I need to do a lot of android testing where the device I use has to be ARM based. While it is possible to create these devices in the default android emulator they are of course very slow on my x86 development machine.

A lot of this testing runs headless and automatically so I thought about setting up an ARM server and emulate the devices there in the hope that the performance would be better. While looking around I realized that there is nearly no information about this. Is it possible to run an android emulator (ether the one provided with the SDK or any other) on a ARM machine to get higher performance for the virtual devices?

why arm? do you have some assembly language in your application? — old_timer, Jul 28 '17 at 18:14
@old_timer we run some third party apps that do not support x86. both: real devices would be an option but I'm looking for something that is easier & cheaper to scale — Martin, Jul 29 '17 at 08:05
Yes, it can, but the default build scripts target linux_x86_64. It will be some work to convert/adjust them. — Michał Leon, Jul 11 '21 at 18:35
Yes, it can run on an Apple Silicon M1 official since July 2021 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64907154/android-studio-emulator-on-macos-with-arm-cpu-m1/65176867#65176867 — hannes ach, May 27 '22 at 12:27

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 02 '20 at 15:08

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This is actually a very good question.

Some cloud services like Amazon are providing the arm based machines. With those machines, we can run android emulators in cheap price.

Google doesn't provide the android emulator binary for arm. But you can build those emulator binaries from AOSP. You have to do some work such as editing of cross-compile build files, adding target directories and building related third party libraries in arm architecture.

If you need any further information, I would attach detailed technical tips or step-by-step manuals.

answered Jun 02 '20 at 15:08

ariane26

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What about this release note from google: [link](https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/emulator#emulator_for_arm64_hosts). Does it look like they provide the binary now or am I wrong? – LeptonByte Nov 21 '20 at 16:27
@LeptonByte I just noticed that Google released that support for arm64 hosts. Thank you for your information. – ariane26 Nov 23 '20 at 20:40

Can the android emulator run on an ARM device

1 Answers1