Emulators - A suggestion

DeerBear

Member
Licensed User
Longtime User
Hello!

As most noobs in B4A development(and Android development in
general, I'd guess) I have a hard time understanding against which
emulators I should be trying the application the most.

There are quite a few options to choose from and, certainly,
each option matches something specific in an Android phone.
The HVGA display mode, for example, surely matches a specific set of
phones/tablets? And so do the others, I'd say.

Given I am not wrong(which in this case is unlikely, but still
possible), one very interesting thing to have would be an
emulator generation wizard.

Something like this:

Screen 1
---------

Choose the kind of phone/tablet you want to emulate:
Phones
-------
o blablablah series N
o xyz series RTGH
Tablets
-------
o N1
o N2

Emulator Name: |_______________________|

Screen 2
--------
[] Include custom SD card size _________ MiB
[] Include sensors/peripherals

Screen 3(optionally showing only if include sensors is checked)
------------------
Select the sensors here:
[] Accelerometer [] Camera [] Giroscope
[] Space Rocket(whatever)

The list in screen 1 should be expandable so that people
could add their favourites and share them on the Forum.
As I see it, it would be interesting to do and provide
awesome value when the number increases to a certain point.

We noobs could gain a few things from such a wizard:

1) We'd be quicker in setting up emulators for testing
2) We could peek around to understand what emulator
does what phone/tablet
3) Once more experienced, we could submit our own
favourites tweaked based on experience or
completely new ones based on what comes on the market.

What do you think? Would it be worth adding to B4A?

Regards,

A
 

DeerBear

Member
Licensed User
Longtime User
From my experience it is best not to use the emulator for development. Use a real device instead. It will be much much faster and more reliable.

The emulator is good for working with the visual designer or to test a specific screen size or version.

What reliability problems did you find with
emulators?

I am not questioning the need to work with a phisical
device at some point in development, I am just
wondering what harsh problems you found that
make it so unreliable that you can't even use it to
test the general workflow and catch the blatant
problems.

Regards,

A
 

DeerBear

Member
Licensed User
Longtime User
The main problem with the emulator is that the emulator is very slow. Especially the installation step.
From time to time emulators may get corrupted. However it is easy to delete the AVD and create a new one.
Don't get me wrong, it is completely fine to develop with the emulator.

Yeah I have noticed both problems :)
I guess for the likes of me who don't
have a day job in the Android ecosystem, emulators
constitute a perfect "middle man" between
spending lots of money on devices and having to
debug by hand :)

As it happens, I am under the impression that
there are many people who fall in this category:
they want to get their feet wet on Android but
can't invest the thousands of pounds needed to buy
devices of all sorts.

Hence, my request is still about reasonable and the
only question that remains to answer is: is this
pond of Android wannabees big enough to
warrant a wizard of that sort?
This, only you can answer :)

I don't know, but I suspect it might be the case.

Regards,

A
 
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