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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."
Android is available for x86 these days and you can use hardware acceleration (CPU and GPU). Just set it up and get near-native performance. Or if you have an Android phone just `adb install -r blah.apk` what more can you want?
Given the open source nature of Android, what I don't understand is how no project so far has integrated the Android runtime with the Linux desktop. Licencing issues maybe? Leave it in a separate PPA.
It would be amazing to be able to run Android applications in Linux seamlessly, ideally integrated with the indicators and notifications provided by the OS.
That would be a killer feature (and would expand the library of games available for Linux by 1,000,000%), in addition to other applications.
I know it is possible to emulate Android, there are some options for this, but it is not about emulating a phone in my computer; I already have a phone. What I would love is to run Android apps in it (of course, as long as that software includes x86 libraries, or there is an emulation layer available).
Yes. You can step through the code on your device from your pc. (Even if connected over wifi. Which is nice, when it works, but it's a little flakey. It's solid over USB though).