Why is the Android phone simulator so slow?

Question

Compared to the iPhone and Windows Phone 7 equivalents it\'s takes forever to start up - is it realistic to expect this to improve over time ?

Answer 1

I wouldn't bet my money that it will improve significantly. That is because Android uses a QEMU-based emulator (compared to IPhone's simulator).

Because the IPhone is simulated, it can translate instructions to native processor code on the host machine, which is way faster than the QEMU alternative.

The great advantage with emulation is that the code that is run on the emulator si actually the code that will be running on the physical device, so a possible round of bugs is avoided.

Now, on improving the speed of the Android emulator, you could:

• open the emulator and not close it for every launch; (re)installing an application in an open emulator is almost instantaneous

• use the -no-boot-anim command line switch when starting the emulator; this will improve somewhat the startup time

• use a real device to test your application with