Hi all, So I've recently upgraded to a new MacBook with Apple's new M1 SoC, which comes with Rosetta 2 technology to translate x64 apps on the fly for compatibility with ARM. However, as expected, MIT App Inventor's macOS emulator does not function (natively or through translation). Was just wondering if a native version of the emulator for ARM was being worked on. I'm by no means versed in. Welcome to the Android Emulator. This document gives you some background on the emulator and outlines how you can start hacking and contributing to the emulator! Just get me started with development! Make sure to install Android Studio and the associated SDKs. Do not forget to install the official emulator and create a few android virtual. Dec 04, 2020 741g released this on Dec 4, 2020. This is the first preview. This only works on M1 Apple Silicon Macs. It has a lot of rough edges. To use, open the.dmg, drag/drop to /Applications, then right click in /Applications and select Open; skip the developer identity verification check. The first launch may take a while. The Android emulator supports Mac OS X 10.6 and up (Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite) and will work for all Apple computers (. Android Emulator Apple Silicon Preview Webview doesn’t work No sound No device skins Video codecs not working 32 bit ARM apps won’t work Graphical glitches in androidstudio.googleblog.com.
This document gives you some background on the emulator and outlines how you can start hacking and contributing to the emulator!
Just get me started with development!
Make sure to install Android Studio and the associated SDKs. Do not forget to install the official emulator and create a few android virtual devices. Next follow the instructions for the platform you would like to work on:
We use the Repo tool to manage working accross multiple branches.
About the Emulator
The Android Emulator simulates Android devices on your computer so that you can test your application on a variety of devices and Android API levels without needing to have each physical device.
The emulator provides almost all of the capabilities of a real Android device. You can simulate incoming phone calls and text messages, specify the location of the device, simulate different network speeds, simulate rotation and other hardware sensors, access the Google Play Store, and much more.
Testing your app on the emulator is in some ways faster and easier than doing so on a physical device. For example, you can transfer data faster to the emulator than to a device connected over USB.
The emulator comes with predefined configurations for various Android phone, tablet, Wear OS, and Android TV devices.
Recommended Reading
The following is a list of concepts that are important. Please read these links and any other links you can find. If you find a link that you think does a better job at explaining the concept, please add it here:
QEMU is an open source competitor to VMware Workstation, VirtualBox, HyperV. It is focused on Linux server virtualization on Linux servers. While QEMU does support booting other OS’s, we don’t use that functionality since Android is Linux.
The Android Emulator is downstream from the QEMU emulator. It adds support for booting Android devices, emulates typical Android hardware (OpenGL, GPS, GSM, Sensors) and a GUI interface. The android emulator extends qemu in various ways.
For an overview of Qemu see:
The QEMU emulator leverages technologies like hardware Hypervisors KVM (Linux) and HAXM (Windows/Mac)
The QEMU emulator supports both guest images that require full virtualization and guest images that require paravirtualization technologies like virtio
The emulator passes a device tree blob to a guest kernel to describe the guest hardware
When running a non-x86 image on an x86 host, QEMU will JIT the non-x86 code into x86 code. See this lectutre for more. The MMU (page table hardware) is emulated in software, which is unfortunately slow.
You will need to build Android kernels and system images that the emulator will run. The easiest way to obtain these is to make use of the publicly released images. You can find more details here.
Building the Emulator
The emulator uses Cmake as a meta build generator, and all the necessary compilers and toolchains are included in the repository. Make sure you have read the section above as the requirements to succesfully build vary slightly from platform to platform.
In general you can run the following script:
For incremental builds you can use ninja. For example
Contributing code
The emulator uses a coding style derived from the Chromium style. We use the repo tool to submit pathces. The usual workflow is roughly as follows:
This will create a git branch called my_awesome_feature. You can now work on your patch.
Once you have written a patch you can send it out for code review. We use gerrit for code reviews.
Use the repo tool to upload or update a CL:
- “--cbr” means “upload the current branch”,
- “--re” supplies the initial reviewers list
Add “-t” switch to use the current git branch as a review topic (topic groups CLs together and only allows them to be submitted when all got +2/+verified)
The repo tool will provide you with a url where you can find your change.
Code Reviews
Make sure to check the CL against our coding style: coding style. Coding style isn’t frozen: just edit it in our repository and create a code review to propose a change.
Some good articles on code reviewing, especially when it comes to google:
- The CL Author’s Guide, which gives detailed guidance to developers whose CLs are undergoing review.
- How to Do a Code Review, which gives detailed guidance for code reviewers.
Below are some short notes relevant to the emulator.
Keep in mind that all of the code reviews are open source and visible to everyone!. In other words, be nice and and provide actionable constructive feedback.
C++ over C for all new code. Always.
After uploading a CL for review, author should “+1” it when they think it’s ready for reviewing. A CL without author’s “+1” is a “work in progress” and other reviewers may ignore it..
Prefer not to send a WIP CL to reviewers and only add them when it’s in a reviewable state. If you realized that you added reviewers too soon, just remove them - “x” button in the browser UI for each reviewer actually works.
Avoid large CLs. There are always exceptions, use your best judgement to improve code clarity and to help other maintainers in the future.
Split the changes into smaller isolated chunks and submit those as a single topic If you touch multiple components, that’s a good way to split the CL.
Changes into any QEMU files must be in their own CL - otherwise rebasing into the new version becomes 10x more painful.
“-2” is sticky, it remains there until the very same reviewer removes it. If you “-2”-ed someone, it’s always a good thing to communicate to them about the follow-up
Abandon the CLs you don’t need anymore
Tests: when reviewing the code, make sure there’s a test or a really good reason for its absence
Merging downstream Qemu
Merging changes from the qemu branch should be done on the emu-master-qemu branch. You will need to this on a linux machine as qemu development happens in a linux environment. Once you have obtained this branch you can add the remote qemu repository as follows:
Now you can start merging in changes:
Be smart, merge only a few commits at a time
Next you should try to build qemu standalone:
Now you are ready for building, testing, and merging the next set. You could have a look at this script to automate this slightly.
This is the second post that I dedicate to talk about configurations using the new M1 Apple processor. As I said in the previous post, these configurations are workarounds until stable versions are released, however, for me, they have been useful and I guess that someone in the same situation as me can benefit from that.
Using Android studio in the new Macbook Air
When you install Android Studio you will get the following warning:
Unable to install Intel® HAXM
Your CPU does not support VT-x.
Unfortunately, your computer does not support hardware-accelerated virtualization.
Here are some of your options:
Android Emulator Online
1 - Use a physical device for testing
2 - Develop on a Windows/OSX computer with an Intel processor that supports VT-x and NX
3 - Develop on a Linux computer that supports VT-x or SVM
4 - Use an Android Virtual Device based on an ARM system image
(This is 10x slower than hardware-accelerated virtualization)
Creating Android virtual device
Android virtual device Pixel_3a_API_30_x86 was successfully created
And also in the Android virtual device (AVD) screen you will read the following warning:
Android Emulator Apple Silicon Preview Free
If you want to learn more regarding virtualization in processors you can read the following Wikipedia article, the thing is that our M1 processor doesn’t support VT-x, however, we have options to run an Android Virtual Device.
As the previous message was telling us, we have 4 options. The easiest way to proceed is to use a physical device, but what if you haven’t one available at the moment you are developing?
From now on, we will go with the option of using an Android virtual device based on an ARM system image as options 2 and 3 are not possible to execute.
Using the virtual emulator
The only thing that you have to do is to download the last available emulator for Apple silicon processors from Github https://github.com/741g/android-emulator-m1-preview/releases/tag/0.2
Once you have downloaded you have to right-click to the .dmg file and click open to skip the developer verification.
After installing the virtual emulator, we have to open it from the Applications menu.
After opening it you will see Virtual emulator in Android Studio available to deploy your Android application. Make sure to have Project tools available in Android Studio (View -> Tool Windows -> Project)
After pressing the launch button you will get your Android application running in your ARM virtual emulator :-)
Conclusion
Best Free Android Emulator
In this post, we have seen that is possible to install Android Studio in Macbook Air M1 and use a virtual device even that your M1 doesn’t support VT-x. You can learn more about this emulator in the following references: