Moving from Eclispe/ADT to Android Studio I was exploring some alternative configuration to improve my building environment. I came across a nice Android device emulator called Genymotion. I find it very interesting and really fast so that I decided to use it as my device emulator. In this post I will explain how to setup Android development environment using Android Studio and Genymotion. Everything is very easy.
What do you need?
- Android Studio already installed
- Oracle VM VirtualBox ( you can download it here)
- Genymotion Android emulator (download it here)
- Genymotion Android studio plugin
Installing Oracle VM VirtualBox
If you use Windows platform you have everything in your download otherwise you have to download the VM VirutalBox by yourself and install it. The process is very straightforward so I won’t go into the details. This step is necessary otherwise the Android Emulator won’t start.
Installing Genymotion Android device emulator
The first thing you have to do is creating a free account so that you can download the emulator. You can choice among different platforms, in my case I selected Mac OS X. Once you have downloaded it and installed it you have something like that:
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Where you can have different emulator available. You select one and download it from the net. At the end you have your emulator ready to run:
Installing Android Studio Plugin
In order to integrate the development tool with the emulator you have to install a plugin for Android Studio. Go to Preferences and look for Plugin the search box. Then you add the plugin you have already downloaded and you have:
Now you can run your Android project and you will find:
The emulator is completely integrated in your development tool.The first time you run the emulator you can find an alert asking the Android SDK installation path:
Once you have configured it you can run your project:
Thank you!
We will contact you soon.
Francesco AzzolaJuly 17th, 2013Last Updated: July 24th, 2013
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I used Genymotion emulator, there is no doubt that it is very fast then android default emulator but on other side it also consume much more memory of system and make system very slow ( on my development system).
Are you agree with me ?
Nope, sorry., don’t agree on the “make system slow” or on “consume much more memory”.
Getting a slowdown? It’s a virtual machine. Like all VMs you should either install it on your SSD, or, if you don’t have space on that, or don’t have an SSD, install it so it’s on a different spindle (i.e. different hard drive) from your main one.
As far as memory goes, I’m seeing it take on the order of 0.7G. Surprised that’d be an issue on even a moderately modern machine.
i read many argument from other web, this emulator consume much memory, that very bad for pc used 2 GB of ram. now, i use bluestack for emulator but this emulator very slow on my laptop :( . whether there are other alternative for android emulator?
I checked this, and Genymotion only used about 1.3GB of RAM while Android Studio was using 1.4GB. With the total being 2.7GB of RAM, this shouldn’t be a problem as an average laptop these days has 4GB of RAM. If you don’t have 4GB of RAM, then you seriously need to upgrade.
Hello, thank you for presenting this interesting setup!
I am actually trying to find an alternative emulator because my environment is a Windows EC2 AWS instance (Win Server 2012) and HAXM is not supported there.
Would you mind explaining why VirtualBox is needed in non Windows platforms? I need to understand if this could impact me since my environment is atypical.
Hello, thank you for presenting this interesting setup!
I think It has an advantage of using virtual device rather than real device. In this case, genymotion is the best one, I think.