With the rapid growth of device performance and capabilities, it has been difficult for the Android Emulator to keep up with all the change and, it has been an increasing requirement to use costly, physical development hardware for any real testing of an Android App.
Yesterday, Google released a new system image for the emulator, Android 4.0.3 r2, which features OpenGL ES 2.0 GPU support, enabling the emulated PC experience to receive acceleration from the host GPU, even to the extent of allowing playable OpenGL games within the emulator.
Google didn't just stop there on the performance front and has recently added hardware acceleration for floating-point operations, effectively doubling their compute speed. Going a step further this time, the emulator can now tap into the host CPU natively through virtualization, resulting in a significantly faster experience over the previous sloth of an emulator.
Usability has also been improved, with the emulator now featuring support for sensors and multi-touch via a tethered Android device. Google plans to bring support for Bluetooth and NFC further down the line.
In the development of both iOS and Android applications, it has become an increasing requirement to use physical hardware from the very early stages as opposed to simply end-stage testing or being able to avoid hardware tests altogether in the case of simple apps. Google has taken an effective step forwards in restoring the usefulness of the 'Emulator' as a development tool.
