Do common AVD configurations already exist somewhere that can be downloaded/viewed?

Question

I'm guessing everybody who does Android programming has on their own created multiple AVDs for various devices for testing purposes. I didn't really want to add to the "reinvent the wheel" club, and was hoping someone could point me to an article that lists out various AVD configurations, or a site/link to download already created AVDs to copy into my Eclipse environment, or scripts to create the AVDs via the command line, etc.?

The only thing I've been able to find so far via Googling is this blog article...

http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/android/common-android-virtual-device-configurations/

Be nice if a bunch of already-created AVD configurations shipped with the Android SDK, for the various popular Android devices.

Thanks in advance for any advice/info.

Answer 1

What you are looking for (namely a list of AVD configurations that will model different physical devices) does not exist. It doesn't exist because the options available in the emulator are very general, and do not model what you will find on an actual device. As the blog article states:

If you own one of these devices, you may immediately notice that the screen doesn’t look the same (software-wise). The emulator does not provide third-party add-ons, such as the HTC Sense UI.

That is huge. Third-party software changes the visual look and feel of the application significantly.

It is currently quite difficult to have a consistent look and feel in Android between different phones and providers, but the solution to the problem does not lie in an AVD configuration. The primary problems are related to different hardware, strange things that different providers stick in to the views, and differences in the images that are included for button backgrounds and things of that nature. The two biggest and most important emulator settings are screen size and version. Beyond that there isn't much. No one is going to create detailed emulator setting for each phone because those emulator settings have little to do with how the phone is going to work. From my own experience, every phone is different, and there almost certainly will be bugs specific to each model of phone. The emulator will show you almost none of that, which is why no one is coming up with lists of emulator settings for all the devices--they're testing on the devices themselves.