Introduction

In the precedent post, while I was talking about VS Emulator for Android I’ve also talked about Genymotion.

The main problem at that time was that VirtualBox had a lot of issues with Windows 10 but finally everything is solved — as long as you use one of the latest beta like build 102375 — so now we can talk about the best solution for Android development.

Genymotion

Genymotion is a multi-platform Android emulator that runs on top of VirtualBox to provide you better performance than the standard Android Virtual Device emulator and it’s free for personal use.

Once you’ve installed and opened Genymotion a window like the following one will be appear on your screen:

In this window you’ll be able to tune the settings, download or start a virtual device right on your desktop.

A few seconds after pressing the Start button the emulator will appear:

On the right toolbar, with the free version, you can easily change battery level, set current GPS position, emulate camera, etc.

To have full access to all features you have to pay for the license.

Install Google Apps on Genymotion

Up to this point the only thing that could stop you from using Genymotion could be the lack of the Google APIs but fortunately the problem can be fixed in a few steps:

1. Download Genymotion ARM translation and the proper Google Apps package based on which Android version you’ve chosen for your device
2. Drag and drop the zip packages on your virtual device and confirm the dialog that will appear
3. Close and restart the virtual device and now your device is fully working with Google APIs

AVD vs Genymotion performance comparison

To giving you an idea of how it works I’ve made some simple tests (time in minutes): Test 1 — Emulator opening and Android booting time, Test 2 — Emulator booting time (from Android logo), Test 3 — Hello World install and opening time

As you can see Genymotion is up to 3x faster than Android Virtual Device.