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Google has improved the emulator which will help android app developers to develop applications with ease. The Android emulator is an application tool for Android developers for building and testing the Android applications. It’s a virtual mobile device to test android applications on a computer. It mimics all the hardware and software of a typical mobile phone. It allows testing an application without the use of an actual mobile phone.

Google has recently updated the features of the android emulator on April 9, 2012. This update will appease android developers. As the demand and use of android devices have grown by leaps and bounds, the emulator found it difficult to keep pace. Last month Google added x86 support to the android emulator that allowed android developers to test ICS app at ‘usable’ speeds. Google has now made ‘significant improvements’ to the emulator to enhance the performance.

GPU Support: The emulator has an in-built GPU support. Android devices rely more on the graphics chip for improved performance. So the emulator will have the advantage of hardware acceleration. This will facilitate more realistic simulation. The emulator supports OpenGL ES 2.0, so it can run OpenGL games inside it. This will enable developers to develop games for different devices and to run it within the emulator to check the performance.

Hardware Feature: Hardware is the most essential element for any electronic device. Google has also enhanced the hardware features of the android emulator. Last year it added the camera support to the emulator, and now with some hardware upgrades made, android developers can use tethered android device to test inputs for sensors and multi-touch input. Google is working on providing Bluetooth and NFC support to the emulator. This emulator will be extremely useful for android developers.

CPU Performance: The android emulator has been improved on the CPU performance as well. The android engineering team wrote: “Hardware floating point operation has been available for system images since Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), allowing CPU operations to be emulated roughly twice as quickly. Last week’s r17 developer tools release included x86 system images and host drivers (available through the SDK Manager), allowing the emulator to access the host CPU natively and offer significantly faster execution.”

Android platform has close interactions between applications and system components, so this improved emulator will provide a complete system image. This shows how much interest Google takes to boost performance for android application developers.

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