One of the things I’ve consistently heard from just about anyone involved in Android development are laments about the sorry state of the Android Emulator included in Google’s Android Studio. It seems that particularly its performance is not great, with people often resorting to third-party options or real devices. Well, it seems the Android development team at Google has taken this to heart, and has spent six months focusing almost solely on fixing up the Android Emulator.
We know how critical the stability, reliability, and performance of the Android Emulator is to your everyday work as an Android developer. After listening to valuable feedback about stability, reliability, and performance, the Android Studio team took a step back from large feature work on the Android Emulator for six months and started an initiative called Project Quartz. This initiative was made up of several workstreams aimed at reducing crashes, speeding up startup time, closing out bugs, and setting up better ways to detect and prevent issues in the future.
↫ Neville Sicard-Gregory at the Android Developers Blog
Steps taken include moving to a newer version of Qt for the user interface of the emulator, improving the graphics rendering system used in the Android Emulator, and adding a whole bunch of tests to their existing test suite. The end result is that the number of crashes in the Android Emulator dropped by 30%, which, if bourne out out in the real world, will have a material impact for Android developers. During the Project Quartz effort, Google also cut the number of open issues by 44%, but they do note only 17% of those were fixed during Project Quartz, with the remainder being obsoleted or previously fixed issues.
If you download or update to the latest version of Android Studio, you’ll get the new and improved Android Emulator as well.
I can agree that the Android Emulator can act a bit wonky.
Thom Holwerda,
Here here! I haven’t tried the new android emulator yet, but if it works it will be a much needed improvement! It’s great that google decided to fix it, but why now? This problem has existed for decades and it was even worse back then because computers were even slower than today. Virtually unusable. It makes me wonder if google’s own employees even used the emulator themselves. I’d imagine it was way too slow for google internally and google’s solution was probably just to buy more dedicated hardware for development instead.