“The Android emulator is a key tool for Android developers in building and testing their apps. As the power and diversity of Android devices has grown quickly, it’s been hard for the emulator keep pace. Today we’re thrilled to announce several significant improvements to the emulator, including a dramatic performance upgrade and support for a broader range of hardware features, notably sensors and multi-finger input.” That sound you’re hearing is the collective Android developer base shouting ‘about damn time!’.
I tried it last year. The emulator was next to useless on linux because it was so slow and buggy, I had to give up. The install was straitforward so I assume I didn’t install it incorrectly (it’s a possibility though).
Since it’s not mentioned in the article, does anyone know if the linux version has substantially improved? I am still interested in using it if it works.
Edited 2012-04-10 00:55 UTC
I had installed the Android emulator on my Linux computer as well and it was really slow, so I don’t think it was a problem with your install at all.
I’m glad to see this kind of news, performance improvements are always welcome.
Where the F$%^ is the download link? It’s great to talk about vapor, but without a d/l link, it’s just vapor.
Follow the instructions to install the Android SDK from http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing.html and then the updated emulator image will be in the list of components to download.
An update appeared for me. I assume this is revision 18 of the Android SDK Tools? If so it appears that if you have the Android SDK tools already installed, the update just appears.
That is probably the main issue with cold booting the emulator
Cold boot takes about 20-30 seconds for me now. But that hasn’t been an issue in a long time with the addition of snapshots. It’s been down to a few seconds for emulator startup after the initial first-boot.
Unfortunately at the moment the snapshot feature and GPU acceleration are mutually exclusive. Hopefully that will be resolved soon.
about time they added multi touch support, maybe they’ll even improve the wysiwyg gui editor now