I think any experienced Android dev will tell you, the best solution is to buy a bunch of used Android devices, plug them in, and publish to the device directly for testing. Wasting any time with the emulator or this "virtual machine" isn't going to cut it in the end anyway.<p>The only time I fire up the emulators is to make sure my assets are scaling properly for the various screen sizes of devices I don't own yet.
I've been using Android-x86 in a VirtualBox for development for a long time, and totally recommend it if your app is pure Dalvik (i.e. no native ARM code). It's a night and day difference after using the emulator.<p>One pain point I have, though, is the need to always hit the VirtualBox host key when switching between Eclipse and VirtualBox, since there's no true integration. Sometimes I also get some weird effects with the mouse pointer not being able to move around the entire framebuffer. (Hmm, maybe a VirtualBox integration module for android-x86 would be a good weekend project...)
This is another symptom of why Android development is such a pain. You have to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop just to get to the point where you can get actual work done. If a tool ends up wasting more time than it saves, it isn't a tool, it is an obstacle.
Someone should sell a usb dongle with an ARM chip on it that can run android using the emulator on your dev machine for display and input.<p>Debugging on a phone is not so bad, but it's not quite as nice as the iOS simulator experience.
I've tried this. It's faster even than developing with a device -- once you get a good test/debug flow going it's awesome. Some big caveats though:<p>* No Google APIs. So no MapView.<p>* The various builds are quirky. I couldn't get networking to function in the "Stable" Froyo build. Meanwhile, the Gingerbread build used in the linked post reports the wrong SDK version (it claims Honeycomb but is actually Gingerbread). The deprecated Froyo build I tried didn't support Google Accounts. And so on.<p>Meanwhile, new builds are currently impossible due to the ongoing kernel.org outage (android-x86 has some hard submodule deps on git.android.kernel.org), so my attempts to go in and tweak the build were thwarted.<p>Still, very cool stuff. I think the iOS simulator is fantastic and I've been pining for something similar for Android. This doesn't quite meet my needs at the moment, but it would save me multiple hours per week if I could get it set up properly.
based on the data in the article QEmu + Android ARM runs at approximately same speed as Nexus One phone which is a good thing, right? I dont want my development emulator to run twice as fast as actual hardware, do I.<p>The question is whether you can make the emulator run as fast as modern dual core android phones.
What system takes 55 seconds to boot an Android Virtual Device?<p>I get to the home screen with everything loaded in about 18 seconds. I'm on a fairly new system with decent processor and memory to spare, but even on my old single processor 4GB laptop I get the emulator launched in about 35 seconds.