Making the room work in mac android emulator

#Making the room work in mac android emulator android
#Making the room work in mac android emulator software
#Making the room work in mac android emulator free

There is also Project Nitrogen which is a larger effort on testing introduced back at Google IO 2018, but there hasn't been any public announcement on its progress this year.

#Making the room work in mac android emulator android

There was a dedicated session titled Emulator in a Continuous Integration (CI) Environment at Android Developer Summit 2019.They also opensourced a bunch of scripts for running Emulators in (Docker) containers. Google recently published a blog post highlighting some of the new tools they've been working on to improve deployability and debuggability of the Emulators on CI.This feature has been unified with the -no-window mode in a recent release. Earlier this year the Android Emulator Team added support for running the emulator engine in headless mode to reduce some of the implicit expectations on the host machine running the emulator in a CI environment.It's worth to note that recently Google has been putting more efforts into offering better support for running Emulators on CI. This means currently we are not able to run hardware-accelerated emulators on some of the most popular cloud-based CI services such as CircleCI and Travis. This presents a challenge on CI as to be able to run hardware accelerated emulators within a docker container, KVM must be enabled by the host VM which isn't the case for most cloud-based CI providers due to infrastructural limits.

#Making the room work in mac android emulator software

However, installation of special software (HAXM on Mac & Windows, QEMU on Linux) is required for enabling hardware acceleration support. The modern Intel Atom (x86 and x86_64) emulators intend to provide much better performance with GPU hardware acceleration. But more importantly ARM-based system images are no longer supported by Google, as only x86 and x86_64 images are provided for recent API levels. Out of those requirements mentioned earlier, enabling hardware acceleration support on the host VM has been the most difficult one to meet. In this post I'll share my journey on finding the best solution for running Android Emulators on CI for opensource projects.

Provides enough RAM for running both Gradle and an instance of Emulator.Supports running modern x86 and x86_64 based emulators with hardware acceleration (KVM) enabled for better performance.Supports running emulators in headless mode (as of Emulator 29.2.7 Canary this is equivalent to running emulator -no-window).Supports configuring the Android Emulator system images used - API level, target: (default or google_apis), arch / ABI (x86 or x86_64).Instead I needed something that checks these boxes:

#Making the room work in mac android emulator free

So Firebase Test Lab is not an option as the free plan has a daily limit of 10 test runs on virtual devices and 5 test runs on physical devices. I wanted to be able to run all these tests on each PR / merge into master without worrying about things like usage limits and quotas.

I recently released FlowBinding which has over 160 instrumented tests across 10 library modules. But today most cloud-based CI services are still lacking hardware acceleration support from the host VM, which is the no.1 blocker for running tests on modern Android Emulators (especially on recent API levels) on CI. For small teams who are not quite ready to invest in a fully-fledged cloud-based testing service, running tests on the Android Emulator within a docker container has been the most viable and common approach.However, for opensource projects with a large amount of tests, free plans offered by these services likely won't cover the needs, while paying for such service is usually hard to justify for an opensource effort. Cloud-based device farms such as Firebase Test Lab are a much more cost-effective solution for most teams as they take care of managing the infrastructure while offering simple APIs for integrating with existing CI pipelines.Setting up and managing an in-house device farm is expensive and requires long-term investment and on-going infrastructure support - not a viable option for most teams.It's almost 2020 and it remains a challenge to run Android Instrumented tests on CI, especially for opensource projects and small teams: