Android virtual device - Emulator

The Android Development Tools (ADT) include an emulator to run an Android system. The emulator behaves like a real Android device (in most cases) and allows you to test your application without having a real device. You can configure the version of the Android system you would like to run, the size of the SD card, the screen resolution and other relevant settings. You can define several devices with different configurations. Via the emulator you select which device should be started, you can also start several in parallel. These devices are called \"Android Virtual Device\" (AVD). The ADT allow to deploy and run your Android program on the AVD.

Google v/s. Android AVD

During the creation of an AVD you decide if you want an Android device or an Google device.

An AVD created for Android will contain the programs from the Android Open Source Project. An AVD created for the Google API\'s will also contain several Google applications, most notable the Google Maps application. If you want to use functionality which is only provided via the Google API\'s, e.g. Cloud2DeviceMessaging or Google

Emulator Shortcuts

Obviously you can use the emulator via the keyboard on the right side of the emulator. But there are also some nice shortcuts which are useful.

Alt +Enter Maximizes the emulator. Nice for demos.

Ctrl+F11 changes the orientation of the emulator.

F8 Turns network on / off.

Performance

Try to use a smaller resolution for your emulator as for example HVGA. The emulator gets slower the more pixels its needs to render as it is using software rendering. Also if you have sufficient memory on your computer, add at least 1 GB of memory to your emulator. This is the value \"Device ram size\" during the creation of the AVD. Also set the flag \"Enabled\" for Snapshots. This will save the state of the emulator and let it start much faster.

Hardware Button

Android 4.0 introduced that devices do not have to have hardware button anymore. If you want to create such an AVD, add the \"Hardware Back/Home keys\" property to the device configuration and set it to \"false\".