Macos Android Emulator

| 17-09-2021
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Available from Android 4.4 to latest Android versions, in all screen sizes and on a large variety of platforms including our own but also AWS, Google, Azure and Alibaba. This is an example of Genymotion Cloud on AWS using c6g (ARM) instance without graphical acceleration. Xbox app for mac. Bluestacks is one of the most popular Android emulators for Windows and is probably the best Android emulator for macOS, as well. This emulator is built primarily for mobile gamers and claims to provide a “PC-like” gaming experience for your mobile apps. Android Emulator on CircleCI’s MacOS Executor The Android Emulator, unfortunately, doesn’t work in CircleCI ’s conventional ( Docker -based) Android build environment. With a little tinkering, though, we can make it work in another environment!

The Android Emulator, unfortunately, doesn’t work in CircleCI’s conventional (Docker-based) Android build environment. With a little tinkering, though, we can make it work in another environment!

What Doesn’t Work

Since CircleCI 2.0, the recommended build environment for most projects is the Docker Executor. Overall, it’s great: Docker images are fast, portable, and cacheable. Chances are you can start with a prebuilt one.

One of the jobs in our current workflow boots up the circleci/android:api-29-node image in about four seconds with all the build tools we need. For building and publishing, this is fantastic.

Macos Android Emulator

Unfortunately, when you begin configuring your tests, you’ll soon realize that this environment can’t run the Emulator.

Macos Android Emulator Bluetooth

Why?

To achieve reasonable performance, the Android Emulator needshardware acceleration, which depends on supporting capabilities from the processor and operating system. We can use the Emulator’s -accel-check flag to interrogate a system’s compatibility. Here’s what it says in a CircleCI Docker environment:

(That means “no.”)

Operating System Android

But wait! Docker is but one of several executors available on CircleCI. Macos el capitan iso. What if we use a conventional Linux VM instead of Docker? (This is called the machine executor).

That doesn’t work either. Bummer.

Mac os capitan download iso. At this point, you might heed CircleCI’s advice and pursue a third-party service like Firebase Test Lab or AWS Device Farm, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet.

What Works

We were already using CircleCI’s MacOS support to build and test our React Native app for iOS. I had one last wacky idea to try: could we run the Android Emulator on MacOS?

It works!

Configuration

Without the convenience of an externally-maintained Docker image, it’s on you to install the Android tools. If you want to try Android testing on MacOS, hopefully our configuration can save you some time:

Mac Os Android Emulator V0 46 2 25

And here’s install-android-tools.sh:

Macos Android Emulator No Internet

Conclusion

It’s unorthodox, but this approach has worked reasonably well so far for our small React Native project. One set of Appium tests can run against both iOS and Android, and they run the same way in CircleCI that they do locally.

I’d be interested to hear about your experiences with Android UI tests in CircleCI, whether via a third-party service, a CI host that supports the Emulator, or another approach altogether.