Android Needs a Simulator, Not an Emulator

An anonymous reader writes Jake Wharton, Android Engineer at Square, has written an article about one of the big problems with building apps for Android: developers need a simulator for testing their software, rather than an emulator. He provides an interesting, technical explanation of the difference between them, and why the status quo is not working. Here are the basics of his article: "A simulator is a shim that sits between the Android operating system runtime and the computer's running operating system. It bridges the two into a single unit which behaves closely to how a real device or full emulator would at a fraction of the overhead. The most well known simulator to any Android developer is probably (and ironically) the one that iOS developers use from Apple. The iPhone and iPad simulators allow quick, easy, and lightweight execution of in-development apps. ... There always will be a need for a proper emulator for acceptance testing your application in an environment that behaves exactly like a device. For day-to-day development this is simply not needed. Developer productivity will rise dramatically and the simplicity through which testing can now be done will encourage their use and with any luck improve overall app quality. Android actually already has two simulators which are each powerful in different ways, but nowhere near powerful enough."

Comments

The resistance to this idea is surprising

[iPaul]

As I read the comments I find it surprising that people somehow object to this idea because 1) they don't like the terminology, 2) the say the existing emulator is just fine, 3) Apple sucks, 4) If you just do these 37 steps, it works awesome on my machine and 5) did I mention Apple sucks?

I don't program professionally but I am a tinkerer and I did try my hand at both iOS and Android development. As a noob in both, I found the Apple environment much easier in terms of usability. This is not a plug for Apple, but an observation about how fast the tool chain is able to launch the simulator and step into live, running code. There are obviously things that won't work, but I was able to get going quickly and play with the examples. It was also relatively painless (although there was a lot of hoop jumping) to get the code onto my phone and running.

I like the Jet Brains based Android development environment. It's really nice to work it but when it comes to actually running the code you wrote, you basically need a real device. The emulator start up time is horrible and the performance while running is terrible. I've tried to get the x86 ABI running on my machine but I didn't notice much of an improvement. Yes, yes, I know, but Apple sucks. I would call the emulator borderline unusable for development and almost not usable for testing because of its bad performance.

I'd like to try some of the resources he mentioned in the article, but I only found out about them two minutes ago when I read the article. As a noob, I didn't even know they existed. Tools do matter. As Microsoft and Apple have found out, creating really nice development environments is important in capturing mind share. At some point every developer is a noob at something and making easier for the noobs to get going is part of making a platform sticky.

So let the grammar corrections, the Microsoft sucks, the Apple sucks comments come. It doesn't change the fact that being productive isn't just about which APIs you can memorize, but also about the toolchains and environments you use to write code.