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Comment by nextparadigms | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that what the article says, too?

"Last week’s r17 developer tools release included x86 system images and host drivers (available through the SDK Manager), allowing the emulator to access the host CPU natively and offer significantly faster execution."

I just wonder, does this mean that the apps built on this version will only work on x86 devices and you need to modify the app later to work on ARM devices, too? Because if that's the case I probably won't bother with this, since 99.9% of Android units have an ARM chip.

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Almost certainly not --- Android apps are compiled to a platform independent bytecode anyway, so there's no reason the compilation process would be any different here.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_(software)

That's only true of apps written for Dalvik. Applications using the NDK are arch-specific.

Nope. Android apps are, with one caveat, independent of any particular architecture, due to their Java/Dalvik base.

The only situation where anything developed on x86 would not also work on ARM is if you include native code via the NDK (which is not usually done except where you need to wring every last bit of performance out of the device), and that's just a matter of building the native code for all the platforms you intend the app to run on.

The platform used by the emulator image makes no difference to any of that, it just makes it a lot more practical to get usable speed out of it.

which is not usually done except where you need to wring every last bit of performance out of the device

I think that's overstating it a bit. The NDK is very heavily used by the overwhelming majority of premium games, not least because it allows for significant code reuse between Android and iOS. The release of the NDK was the beginning of a massive quality app explosion on the platform.

It's still running the Android flavour of the Linux kernel along with all its various processes inside of a VM. iOS Simulator runs SpringBoard, the various iOS daemons, and any user apps as native processes on the host OS X system. The difference may be negligible though.

Aside from the managed bytecode, when you build with the NDK you can target multiple platforms in the same APK.

e.g. (in the Application.mk)

APP_ABI := x86 armeabi armeabi-v7a

This app will run with gust on any of those platforms.

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