Do I need a real Android device to develop an Android application for the Marketplace?

Question

From your experience, to develop an Android application for the Marketplace, do I need a real Android device to test my applications or using the emulator that ships with the SDK is enough?

Answer 1

Personal experience when working with Windows Mobile:

The emulator was great. Like, really really great. You could do whatever you want it, and everything. However, it came with a snag. A tiny little snag that turned into this huge thing. You see, Microsoft delivered a d3dmref.dll with it, which contains every single function Direct3D Mobile can provide.

However, hardware manufacturers are free to support whatever they want.

So what worked in the emulator has never worked anywhere else. And even when I had something in DirectDraw that worked fine in the emulator and on my PDA, it looked completely screwed up on my friend's (newer) phone.

Yes, you can get by, but you're dealing with a lot of unknowns.

Answer 2

A recommendation would be having an old G1 or Magic with 1.5. I primarily use an N1 which is nice for getting a tactile feel of the application and is usually pretty similar in speed to the simulator. However, there are plenty of performance issues you only notice on low powered devices and there are more quirky little bugs in 1.5 than the later version (1.0 neglected because of lack of market share). I find it useful to at least test against your lowest hardware and software specs to gauge the lowest end experience people will have with an application.