Believe it or not, you can actually use VirtualBox to create your own Android emulator for Mac. Download VirtualBox on your Mac machine, and then set it up with the necessary ISO image from. Nov 18, 2019 The Best Android Emulators for Mac OS X 1. Bluestack was going to be at the top of our list since it is the most common software being used to emulate the Android system on the Mac. Since it is a multi-platform software, it can be projected on to the Windows as well as the Mac operating systems. 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. Feb 12, 2021 4 of the Best Android Emulators For Mac 1. Bluestacks is one of the most popular Android emulators for Windows and is probably the best Android. If you’re looking to test your latest Android project, Genymotion is worth a look. This Android virtual. BlueStacks App Player is probably the most popular emulator for running Android apps on Mac. It is available for both Mac and Windows. It creates a virtual copy of Android OS apps on the guest OS. It uses the unique 'LayerCake' technology that allows you to run android apps on your PC without any external Virtual Desktop Application.
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.
Unfortunately, when you begin configuring your tests, you’ll soon realize that this environment can’t run the Emulator.
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.”)
But wait! Docker is but one of several executors available on CircleCI. What if we use a conventional Linux VM instead of Docker? (This is called the machine executor).
That doesn’t work either. Bummer.
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:
And here’s install-android-tools.sh:
Conclusion
Macos Android Emulator Slow
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.
Macos Android Emulator Bluetooth
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.