[dpcan]

I think any experienced Android dev will tell you, the best solution is to buy a bunch of used Android devices, plug them in, and publish to the device directly for testing. Wasting any time with the emulator or this "virtual machine" isn't going to cut it in the end anyway.

The only time I fire up the emulators is to make sure my assets are scaling properly for the various screen sizes of devices I don't own yet.

[sskates]

As an Android dev, I have to say this is very true. Emulators either don't simulate or don't simulate well enough a lot of stuff that you really want to test, like picking up audio from a microphone, or getting your location from GPS. There are also a lot of device specific quirks that make code run differently on different devices, meaning if you really want to make sure your code runs everywhere you can't just get one phone, you need to get a few.

[aab]

Also, on the emulators you don't usually have Sense UI, Motoblur or any other custom crap the manufacturers decide to put on the real phones. At one point I had 10 Android phones for development & testing just to make sure everything runs the same way on all phones

[bigiain]

Ahhh, "write once, debug everywhere", where have I heard _that_ before?

(for me, that was a lesson learned in 1995 doing Macromedia "cross platform" Mac and Windows development)

[danielrhodes]

Try using the iOS simulator to see what you're missing. The development time is greatly reduced because you're not having to constantly wait for the app to be deployed on the phone. The differences between the simulator and the actual phone are quite minimal.

[georgemcbay]

What you're saying is true, but OTOH there is only one series of iPhones/iPad Apple has to worry about simulating whereas there are thousands of different Android devices, each potentially radically different than the next in terms of resolution, aspect ratio, cpu, device capabilities (gps, microphone, camera, etc).

Of course this diversity is both Android's largest blessing and its biggest curse.

[bwblabs]

Well, the Android emulation is pretty good with GPS & call simulation, only limitation is Eclipse which only let you control 1 emulator (or device) at a time, but if you connect to the emulator port, you can manage quite a lot.

If you start with video (or even audio) displaying/capturing then the emulator is pretty fast useless indeed.