How "good" is the Android Emulator? [closed]

Question

As the title says, how "good" is the Android emulator?

I don't have an Android phone but would it be possible to develop purely using the emulator as the testing environment?

My initial questions about it:

• Is the emulator as responsive as a normal android phone (of course this depends on the exact phone but in general)?
• Is there a way to control the memory on the emulator?
• Has anyone had issues that have been flagged on the phone but not the emulator? or vice versa?
• What's your normal testing procedure to test on both throughout, or emulator recursively and phone at the end?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Answer 1

Q: Is the emulator as responsive as a normal android phone (of course this depends on the exact phone but in general)?
A: Absolutely not! The worst example is the 3D, which is, afaik, only software emulation.

Q: Is there a way to control the memory on the emulator?
A: Please specify, the size of the SD-Card is configurable, the RAM/VM-Memory... I don't know.

Q: Has anyone had issues that have been flagged on the phone but not the emulator? or vice versa?
A: Each device has his own customization. On the emulator you can only change the screen resolution, but caution: the size of your Emulator screen depends on the pixel density you set up. So what might look good on your big emulator could be too tiny on a real device. And don't forget, a finger is much bigger and not as accurate as a mouse cursor.

Q: What's your normal testing procedure to test on both throughout, or emulator recursively and phone at the end?
A: Functionality is tested during the implementation mainly on a (fast) device, like a Nexus One. The real test after implementation will be on as many devices as possible. The UI, too (most differences there)

Since I have a device which is has the latest SDK, I prefer testing on the device. Thats not necessary for programming an app, but please: don't publish an app without at least one test round on a real device :)

Answer 2

1. Yes, the emulator is very fast.
2. Yes, you can set the RAM size of the target you wish to emulate.
3. I'm sure someone has, but I haven't.
4. I usually test on the emulator during development, then on my G1 when I'm ready for longer term testing. After that I test on the emulator when checking compatibility with 1.5, 2.0, and 2.1 targets.

See here for what options targets support. Note there is a GUI tool for setting these up as well.