Head on back to the Android Virtual Device Manager and when creating or amending a virtual device you should now be able to select ‘Intel Atom (x86)’ as an option for whichever Target you installed the CPU image for. This is the equivalent of doing it through the Android SDK manager, once installed you'll be ready to test it out! Testing it out (If you need more help, instructions can be found on the intel website). Once downloaded, open up the installer and follow the instructions. If all has gone well then you're ready to test out your accelerated emulator! OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) users only!ĭownload the HAXM software with Mavericks hot fix. Skip down to the next section to see how to do it manually! Next install the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM) which allows faster Android emulation when on their chips Note: For OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) users there is a bug which means the automatic installation of HAXM does not work. Here's what to do: Open up the Android SDK manager and install the Intel x86 Atom System Image for whichever Android APIs you wish to test your app on. Using a host running OS X with an Intel chip. The emulator has improved in recent years, so it’s nowhere near as slow as it used to be, but testing on the emulator can still be a frustrating experience, particularly if you need to keep switching between multiple Android Virtual Devices (AVDs). To download any new system image, simply click on the download link below it. After that whenever you select a new Android virtual device, then select an x86 bit system image there.

To implement this, just your IDE and SDK must be updated. The next thing we can do is to our host CPU which has Virtual Machine acceleration features instead of the Virtual Machine's ARM CPU one which is slower. By using x86 bit system image, your emulator can start running at a fast speed. The delegating of graphics processing does help but only marginally. The solution is simple: when creating or amending a device simply check ‘use Host GPU’. You can speed things up by handing over this work to your host machines GPU - this not only improves the graphics but also frees up some much needed processing power for other parts of your app. Know how to create a new device using the Android Virtual Device Manager Use your machine's GPUĬurrently the graphics are processed by the devices limited CPU.

Here are a few tricks which can help speed things up: Prior knowledge The problem is the built-in Android emulator is painfully slow and a lot of your time can be taken up just waiting for it to load up and respond to commands. The great thing about emulators are they allow you to test devices with different screen sizes and resolutions from your desktop without actually having to buy a physical device. When developing for Google Android it is important to test your apps properly on multiple devices.

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