Android emulator laggy on Mac

Question

First of all, yes I know there's a lot of topics similar to this issue, I did use the search function on stack overflow.

But most of the issue that were brought up seems to about long boot times.

For me, the emulator is so slow, simply sliding from one home screen to another is like watching a slideshow. I placed in more 'RAM' into the virtual device but nothing changes.

How do I fix this?

I'm using a Macbook Pro 2010 on Mac OS X Lion.

Answer 1

On the latest version of the Android SDK there is support for x86 and native execution. Now it is possible to run the emulator at native speeds on a Mac but there is some work to do by hand.

First you need the latest SDK Tools rev.19+ and Platform tools rev.11+, the Android x86 Atom System Image for 4.0.3 to 4.4 and the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAX) all this from the Android SDK Manager.

After this you need to install HAX, unfortunately the SDK Manager downloads an outdated version. There is the Intel-HAXM hotfix v1.0.8

When you create a new AVD to use this latest system image and enable the GPU support on it (at the moment the snapshot support are not compatible with GPU but it still worths it. The VM will boot up in just a few seconds anyway.

It considerably accelerates the development on Android, it is just a shame that it doesn't works like this out of the box.

Answer 2

The bounty is still open incase anyone comes up with something better.

But so far, the only solution I've found for testing android on Mac OSX is to use a VM. You can still build/install your app from Eclipse as normal using ADT/abd

See http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2011/10/11/getting-started-on-android-for-x86-step-by-step-guide-on-setting-up-android-2223-for-x86-testing-environment-in-oracle-virtualbox/ for step-by-step instructions.