Today, we are excited to announce Quick Boot for the Android Emulator. With Quick Boot, you can launch the Android Emulator in under 6 seconds. Quick Boot works by snapshotting an emulator session so you can reload in seconds. Quick Boot was first released with Android Studio 3.0 in the canary update channel and we are excited to release the feature as a stable update today.
In addition to this new feature, we also wanted to highlight some of the top features from recent releases. Since the complete revamp of the Android Emulator two years ago, we continue to focus on improving speed, stability and adding a rich set of features that accelerate your app development and testing. With all the recent changes, it is definitely worth updating to the latest version of the Android Emulator to use it today.
Top 5 Features
Additionally, over the last several releases, we have improved CPU and I/O performance while enhancing GPU performance, including OpenGL ES 3.0 support. Looking at a common task such as ADB push highlights the improvements in the Android CPU and I/O pipelines:
For GPU performance, we created a sample GPU emulation stress test app to gauge improvements over time. We found that the latest emulator can render higher frame rates than before, and it is one of the few emulators that can render OpenGL ES 3.0 accurately per the Android specification.
More Features
In addition to these major features, there are a whole host of additional features that we have added to the Android Emulator over the last year that you may not be aware of:
Learn more about the Android Emulator in the Emulator documentation.
Getting Started
All of these features and improvements are available to download and use now with Android Emulator v27.0.2+, which you can get via the SDK Manager in Android Studio. For a fast experience, we recommend creating and running the x86 version of emulator system images, with the latest Android Emulator, Intel® HAXM (if applicable) and graphics drivers installed.
We appreciate any feedback on things you like, issues or features you would like to see. If you find a bug, issue, or have a feature request feel free to file an issue. We are definitely not done, but we hope you are excited about the improvements so far.