A Faster Emulator for Android Developers With GPU Support

Google is offering an Android SDK for Android developers, the SDK comes with an Android emulator for building and testing their apps. If you are an Android developer and felt that the emulator is slow, then here is the good news Google added some improvements to the Android emulator with hardware support.

The latest update to the Android emulator brings several improvements including performance upgrade, support for a broader range of hardware features, notably sensors and multi-finger input, Google explains in a blog post.

GPU Support: Today’s update brings GPU support (Android 4.0.3 r2), Google says the performance improvement with the addition of GPU support is significant. Android SDK now supports OpenGL ES 2.0, that means your OpenGL games can run now on emulator. You can test the OpenGL games on the emulator before putting them on devices.

More Hardware Feature Emulation: With this addition “it’s now possible to use a tethered Android device to supply inputs for sensors and multi-touch input.” In addition to this Google is also working to add support for features like NFC and Bluetooth.

Improved CPU Performance: 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.

These are huge improvements and Android developers might be happy with the updates to the Android SDK, but Of course someone who actually used the tools might be able to tell exactly how these new improvements effect Android app development.

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