The Android emulator is super super slow and I could never get it working on my development virtual machine. I thought no problem I will just use Genymotion but due to a video card driver issue on my laptop (not Genymotion’s fault), I couldn’t use it either. I was thinking ok I will just have to use a real device and always have it on me when I do Android development work. This wouldn’t have been ideal though since Android development work is just a side project and who wants to carry an extra device just in case you get a few minutes to work on the project.

Well then I ran across someone that mentioned that Android x86 project. This project allows you to run Android on a pc and virtualbox machine. So I follow the guide at Android x86 virtualbox install and was up and running in no time.

Once I was up and running, the next step was to figure out how to deploy my applications to the machine just like I would with the emulator or a real device. Turns out this is pretty easy to do with the Android Debugging Bridge (adb)

Following the [Debug How To] (http://www.android-x86.org/documents/debug-howto) guide I was able to get it working pretty quickly.

As the article says, it was easiest to get it working with a bridged adapter. Because I was using a virtualbox machine for both development and android x86, this made using NAT way more complicated then if just the Android x86 was the virtual machine.

Bridged Adapter Setup:

  1. Get Android Virtual Machine IP
    • Open Terminal (alt + F1)
    • type netcfg
  2. On the host machine (development machine)
    • Open command prompt
    • type adb kill-server
    • type adb tcpip 5555
      • type adb connect [Android Virtual Machine IP]:5555