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There are many options when creating a virtual device. This video covers the process of creating a virtual device as well as how to run it in the emulator.
Resources
- Network Speeds and Latencies
- Managing Virtual Devices From the Command Line
- Emulator Keyboard Shortcuts*
*The Mac shortcuts for rotating are fn+ctrl+F11 and fn+ctrl+F12
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[SOUND] Hi, my name is Ben and welcome to
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getting started with the Android emulator.
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In this workshop, we're going to become
experts at using the Android emulator.
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The first thing we'll need to
do is set up a virtual device.
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A virtual device is set of hardware and
software options
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which tells the Android emulator what
sort of device we would like to emulate.
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If you've recently
downloaded Android Studio,
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you may already have an appropriate
virtual device created for you.
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However, you might still want to follow
along to see how to create your own.
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Before we create our virtual device,
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we'll want to make sure that
we have HAXM installed.
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HAXM is hardware acceleration for
the emulator.
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With HAXM, the emulator runs
much quicker than it used to.
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We can check if HAXM is installed
by opening the Android SDK manager,
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clicking on the SDK Tools tab, and looking
for a checkbox next to the HAXM entry.
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If HAXM isn't installed, go ahead and
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install it by checking the box on
the left and then clicking apply.
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Once we verify that HAXM is installed we
can go about creating our virtual device.
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We can create and
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manage our virtual devices in
the Android Virtual Device Manager.
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Let's click on the AVD Manager to open it.
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Then, click on Create Virtual Device
to begin the setup process.
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The first choice we need to make is
what hardware we would like to use.
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We can pick from the list of
default hardware profiles or
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we can create our own.
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Let's click on new hardware
profile to get an idea
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of what we're really choosing here.
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It looks like it's just picking the
hardware features of our virtual device,
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like what resolution it is,
if it has a front facing camera, and
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what sensors does it have.
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This would be real useful if
we wanted to emulate a device
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that wasn't on the previous list.
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However, for our purposes the Nexus 6
device definition will do just fine.
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So let's select the Nexus 6 and
then click Next.
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Next we need to pick a system image for
our device.
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The system image represents which
version of Android we want to have
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on our virtual device.
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An important note is that we can only
utilize HAXM on an x86 system image.
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x86 is the type of processor
your computer normally uses,
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whereas ARM is typically
used on mobile devices.
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Since we're running
the emulator on a computer,
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It will be faster to use
the x86 system image.
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Another thing to mention is the target.
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You may have noticed that some of the
targets contain the phrase Google APIs.
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If we pick a target with Google APIs,
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our emulator will come preloaded with
the Google APIs, such as Google maps.
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Let's pick a Marshmallow x86
system image and click Next.
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Lastly, we have several customization
options for our virtual device.
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We can set its starting size and
orientation along with whether or not
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it will show a frame around our virtual
device to make it look like a real phone.
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If we click on Show Advanced Settings,
another option that we have access to
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is setting the source for
the cameras on our virtual device.
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We can choose to not have a camera and
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opening the camera will
crash the camera app.
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We can have an emulated camera which will
display a default image in our camera,
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or if your computer has
a webcam you can choose for
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the webcam image to display
as the camera image.
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I'm going to leave these both as emulated.
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Also, if you're making an app that
relies on a network connection,
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you'll probably want to test how it
works under various network conditions.
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We can set many different networks speeds,
and
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latencies to make testing
much more comprehensive.
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The last important thing to mention
here is that we want to make sure that
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the Enable keyboard input box is checked.
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This lets us type with our physical
keyboard instead of having to
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use the virtual device keyboard.
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Now we can hit Finish, And
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click the Play button next to our
virtual device to test it out.
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Looks great.
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Let's quickly go into the camera app and
see what the emulated camera looks like.
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Hey, that's kind of neat.
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Let's take a picture of it.
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Another way we can launch our virtual
device is by choosing it in the run debug
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configurations.
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Let's click on our app and
select edit configurations, and
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under target devices down here,
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let's select emulator and then pick our
virtual device as the target device.
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Now when we run our app,
it will start directly in the emulator.
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And if the emulator isn't running
it will start automatically.
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Awesome.
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