Android Emulator Apple Silicon

  1. Dec 13, 2020 Vues: 1 523. Just a couple of days ago the first PREVIEW version of the Android Emulator for Apple M1 (Apple Silicon) Chips were released. I downloaded the latest version and tested it stand-alone and with a demo project via Android Studio and both worked just fine. Keep in mind that at this point the status is still PREVIEW and should not be.
  2. We've made a rough initial preview of the emulator running on Apple Silicon available here. It also contains an AOSP system image build for.
  1. Best Free Android Emulator
  2. Android Emulator Apple Silicon Screen
  3. Android Emulator Online
  4. Android Emulator Apple Silicon Watch
  5. Android Emulator Apple Silicon App

Question: Q: Would you recommend Apple Silicon M1for Virtual devices like android emulator More Less Apple Footer This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only.

Smartface In-Browser Emulator & Simulator supports all frameworks such as Objective-C, Swift, Java, Kotlin, React Native, Ionic, Cordova, Smartface and many more. For more information and to start using it, please visit the Appcircle In-Browser Mobile Device Emulator & Simulator product page at https://appcircle.io/emulator/

Developing a mobile application with a platform-based approach (Java and Objective-C/Swift) is not as easy as it looks. There are so many details one needs to consider like platforms, screen technologies, OS versions etc. To avoid these problems, many companies and developers are now using Cross-Platform Mobile Application Development Platforms. Nowadays, Cross-Platform solutions are chosen by 5 of the Top 10 Fortune 500 companies. Gartner estimates that more than 75% of the enterprises will use at least one mobile application development platform by 2020.

Main part of the development process requires adaptation of the application to different screen sizes and resolutions on different devices, just like the different screen sizes of iPhone 4/4S (3.5″), iPhone 5/5S (4″), iPhone 6S/7/8/SE (4.7″) and iPhone 7/8 Plus (5.5″). It’s a well-known fact that virtual device emulators and simulators are very slow on many platforms (like Android). Hence, the real product may appear different on real devices than it appears on virtual emulators in many cases. Moreover, network operations may present different cases on real devices. For instance, Xcode uses an iOS simulator for performance, but as the name indicates, it’s just a simulator, not a real device emulator like Smartface iOS emulator. Thus, most of the developers choose real devices for testing. It might look OK at first glance, but what about iOS development on a Cross-Platform solution?

Due to Apple’s restrictions and the limitation of some Cross-Platform technologies, there are no solutions other than Smartface that support iOS development on a Windows or Linux machine. Other frameworks either don’t support iOS development on Windows at all or they can’t publish or emulate apps on an iOS device without a Mac. This is a big handicap for Cross-Platform development.

Smartface makes it easy to develop for iOS and Android on Windows with a new perspective for developing applications on Cross-Platform technologies. Smartface allows you to emulate your iOS and Android application on a Windows PC with a single click.

Smartface Device Emulator button: You can emulate your application and preview it with a single click

To emulate your application on any iOS device, like an iPad emulator or an iPhone emulator, download Smartface app from the iOS App Store and connect your iOS device to your Windows machine. Make sure you have iTunes installed for your PC to recognize your Apple device and then start developing a native application with Smartface. For the Android case, just set Android SDK path in your project settings in Smartface and click OK. It quickly generates the files in less than a minute and deploy it to the device. You can use a virtual Android device as well.

Smartface WYSIWYG design editor on Windows and same output running on Android and iOS emulators.

Android emulation is already known but you might wonder how emulation works on iOS. The main idea stems from the approach “if iTunes does it, why can’t we?” and we got to work on the solution. Now, we proudly introduce a brand new perspective about it. Moreover, it’s not just an emulator, it also functions as an Android and iOS debugger on Windows. Therefore, you can debug your apps with full debugging features such as breakpoints, watches and real-time code changes.

We are doing everything we can do to make sure the emulation is the same as real deployment process. You can be confident about everything being exactly the same as you developed and it only takes a few seconds to see your application in action. That’s why we named our helper app as “Smartface in Action”.

We will be introducing other cool ideas about mobile app development in the near future and keep yourself ready to hear new cool stuff from us. Stay tuned!

For more information about the Smartface emulators and a demo, you can visit the Appcircle In-Browser Emulator & Simulator product page. Smartface with Appcircle provides full-featured Android and iPhone emulators and simulators online that can run in many desktop operating systems including Windows, Linux, macOS and ChromeOS. You just need an x86 build of your app. Many OS versions are supported from Android 4.4 to Android 9 emulators and iOS 9 to iOS 13 simulators.

Apps downloaded from the App Store (such as iMessage, GarageBand, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Clash of Clans, Mario Kart, Pokemon Go, etc.) will not work with Smartface in-browser emulators. For these applications, you need a real device.

Android Emulator M1 Preview

Note: There is an official repo now which is preferred: (https://github.com/google/android-emulator-m1-preview). We will still watch this repo for issues and comments, but please redirect your activity to the official repo.

This is a preview of some basic Android emulation functionality on the M1. There are still many issues, but apps work at a basic level. To be updated soon with more fixes. The release tag corresponds to this commit: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/qemu/+/aca144a9e9264b11c2d729096af90d695d01455d

Known issues

  • Webview doesn't work
  • No sound
  • No device skins
  • Video codecs not working
  • 32 bit ARM apps won't work
  • Graphical glitches in some Vulkan apps
  • Popup on startup about not being able to find the ADB path (ADB will still notice the emulator if you have it installed though)
  • When building, it may be faster to start then cancel the Python triggered build and then reissue ninja -C objs install/strip versus letting the Python triggered build finish.
Emulator

How to use

This only works on M1 Apple Silicon Macs. M1 (or equivalently capable) SoCs are required; note that this does not work on DTKs as they do not support ARM64 on ARM64 hardwre virtualization via Hypevisor.framework. However, we have plans to add support there as well via Virtualization.framework.

Go to the Github releases page, download a .dmg, drag to the Applications folder, and run. You'll first need to right click the app icon and select Open and then skip past the developer identity verification step (we are working on providing official identity info). The first few times it starts up it will take a while to show up, but subsequent launches will be faster.

Android Emulator Apple Silicon

If you've installed Android Studio and Android SDK and adb is available, the emulator should be visible from Studio and work (deploy built apps, debug apps, etc).

How to configure

Edit /Applications/Android Emulator.app/Contents/MacOS/aosp-master-arm64-v8a/config.ini. Some notable options:

  • disk.dataPartition.size: size of userdata. When reconfiguring, you'll also need to delete all userdata*.img files in that directory.
  • fastboot.forceColdBoot,fastboot.forceFastBoot: whether to enable snapshots. Current default is snapshots disabled. Set fastboot.forceColdBoot=no,fastboot.forceFastBoot=yes to enable snapshots.
  • hw.lcd.density: Virtual display DPI.
  • hw.lcd.width,hw.lcd.height: Virtual display dimensions.
  • hw.ramSize: RAM limit for the guest. (2GB minimum)

How to wipe data

Remove all userdata*.img files in /Applications/Android Emulator.app/Contents/MacOS/aosp-master-arm64-v8a/.

How to build your own emulator

Building the engine

The emulator source code lives (here), but there are a bunch of other dependencies to download, so we use repo.

Best Free Android Emulator

To build, first make sure you have Xcode and Xcode command line tools installed, and that you have Chromium depot_tools in your PATH (link). Then:

Android

Android Emulator Apple Silicon Screen

Note that canceling the python based build after it gets going and issuing just ninja -C objs install/strip may be faster.

The built artifacts are in /path/to/external/qemu/objs/distribution/emulator. They should be automatically signed. However, the binaries in objs/ are not; to sign them, issue ./sign-objs-binaries.sh. Note that this can only be done after ninja -C objs install/strip is successful.

Android Emulator Online

Building the system image

Android Emulator Apple Silicon Watch

The system image is built from AOSP master sdk_phone_arm64 with a few modifications. Ideally, let's be on a Linux host when building the system image---the build is relatively untested on M1 systems, and at least, we need to create a separate case sensitive partition for the AOSP repo. Assuming you're on Linux:

We first need to make an edit to remove all 32 bit support. Patch this change: link to build/make/target/board/emulator_arm64/BoardConfig.mk. Then:

Emulator

After that's done, we can use this script to package up the system image for use in /Applications/Android Emulator.app/Contents/MacOS/aosp-master-arm64-v8a/. Assuming you're still in the Android build environment:

Android Emulator Apple Silicon App

Then, $ZIPPED_NAME.zip can be sent over to the M1 and the contents of its files/ can be coped over into /Applications/Android Emulator.app/Contents/MacOS/aosp-master-arm64-v8a/.