Shouldn't Android emulator be faster when running on Linux and ARM based PC?

Question

I's a little bit counter intuitive to fully emulate ARM processor and whole operating system when already running inside Linux on ARM.

Answer 1

There's no Android Studio or Eclipse for ARM. There's not even a powerful enough ARM laptop for Android development so I don't know why you're under the impression that your development environment is running inside Linux on ARM

So on a normal environment the question seems obvious, running ARM emulator under x86 should be slow. You shouldn't use ARM images, unless you're testing ARM code under NDK.

Android x86 images have been available years ago. They are run directly by the CPU through a virtual machine so the result is much faster. Even if you want to use NDK you should compile for both ARM and x86 and test it in the x86 VM and then do the final test in ARM in the phone/tablet itself.

Moreover Intel has HAXM to accelerate the virtual machine with VT-X virtualization. That will provide you a more powerful Android device than any real ARM device on market.

The improvement in performance is significant as you can see here

The result is an Android device that's more powerful than any phones/tablets that you can find

Of course if you have an ARM-based PC you can install Android and debug it remotely, but you can't run development tools on it directly since they're not available as said above. You can also install Android x86 on an x86 PC or virtual machine if you don't like the built-in emulator/VM and debug similarly

More information:

• How to Ensure You Are Using Intel® HAXM for Android* Emulator
• Why is the Android emulator so slow? How can we speed up the Android emulator?