Android Studio AVD not doing anything

[yugpatel]

I have d/l and installed Android Studio 1.5.1. When I hit Run('app') button and select virtual device, I see "starting AVD " message and then nothing happens. This has been very frustrating for me. If I connect my Galaxy S5, it works fine and app installs and runs. I have searched on google but can not find a solution.

Can someone help me please?
O/S Win7HP -64 bit, 16GB RAM, i5.

 

[purbeast0]

the android emulator is the biggest pile of crap emulator i've ever used. it sucks. it takes literal minutes to boot up the first time you boot it up sometimes. sometimes you will deploy apps to it and it will say it is running it and it just never launches. when that happens you just gotta press it again. i've had it takes like 5-10 minutes to boot up sometimes. on both windows and osx.

it is just a turd to work with. AVD is the reason that i just went and bought a nexus 7 tablet a couple years ago. i have an iphone as my phone so i already had an ios device, but i didn't have anything android. now when i do any android development i hook up my tablet and just use that. it is so much better.

i strongly suggest getting an android device if you want to do android development. it's just not worth the hassle of trying to use AVD, plus the time you save booting up apps and actually trying to use them on the emulator (because they run SLOW AS FFFFUUUUUUUUU ON THERE) will be worth it after about a week of development.

and it's not android studio's fault at all. this happened to me when i was using netbeans to develop with AVD. it's the emulator, it's just awful.

 

[paperwastage]

a) android emulator is an emulator. do you have VT/VT-x/... enabled in your BIOS? (will help with emulator)

(iOS is a simulator... swift/obj-C code is run directly on OS X x86 (doesn't pretend to be ARM)

that's why I prefer to develop on iOS over android, even though I like the android ecosystem better)

b) you can always launch the AVD separately via ./android, and then have Android Studio connect to that AVD later manually

c) there are other emulators/virtualization software available, some are paid, some are free (eg: Genymotion allows noncommercial use for free)

 

[wolf_squad]

use android studio 2.x betas, and latest android build tools etc, they have a new emulator there. ensure you have haxm installed and configured correctly, sometimes a bios settings or even an antivirus can screw it up, and, even though you have it installed, it might still not work. once you set it all up, use android 5 or newer x86 images, and, hopefully, enjoy a reasonably fast experience.

if you still find the emulator sluggish, set the emulator image to have a relatively low resolution, with density that is below your actual screen's density, this way you won't have to do any expensive downscaling, and a previously sluggish emulator can become very nimble.