Hacker News Reader

Comment by stusmall | Hacker News Reader

For a bit of history, once upon a time Android did have one of sorts. You can still see sprinklings are references to it in AOSP but I think the simulator lunch target has been removed. It was from the early early days and allowed them run to run parts of it on the desktop. You can see some of the reasoning on why they preferred the QEMU solution here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/android-porting/fLObl9...

I guess I don't see the point of a simulator either. If the performance is that bad, why not just use hardware?

View on HN

The point of a simulator is it drives deployment time to zero and increases the number of virtual devices on which you can run without adding a new AVD for each. Deploying to a phone takes maybe 40-60 seconds? Maybe less? But I'm not a very patient person. At 60 seconds per deploy, if I make a tiny tweak and then have to wait a full minute for feedback on how it feels, it has become a slow and arduous process to develop. If I deploy to device and immediately discover a null-pointer exception, then that's 120 seconds of my day gone. The amount of time is even longer for an emulator, where it can be as long as five or ten minutes.

It is much much less. I just timed it on my machine. It was 8 seconds for a decent sized(~12M) app. A build and deploy takes much longer, but the long pole isn't the time it takes to install the app on the hardware. If you are having a lot of latency, I don't think a simulator will help.

This is still far longer than it should be.

I just built a not-particularly-large app after making a single-line change and it took 16 seconds to compile, dex, package and install on a running x86 emulator. The installation time is appreciable (4 seconds for my 10MB APK), which would be cut to zero for a simulator. Similarly, removing the dexing and packaging would be a great help.

I'm jealous when I see how fast my iOS colleagues can make code tweaks and see them running on a simulator one second later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com