Android Emulator- What is Emulator|| How it Works?

 The Android emulator is an Android Virtual Device (AVD), which represents a specific Android device. We can use the Android emulator as a target device to execute and test our Android application on our PC. The Android emulator provides almost all the functionality of a real device. We can get the incoming phone calls and text messages. It also gives the location of the device and simulates different network speeds. Android emulator simulates rotation and other hardware sensors.Testing Android applications on emulator are sometimes faster and easier than doing on a real device. For example, we can transfer data faster to the emulator than to a real device connected through USB.

The Android emulator comes with predefined configurations for several Android phones, Wear OS, tablet, Android TV devices.

Android Emulator is a x86 emulator software to simulate Android OS on PC. It provides native user experience of Android OS, allows you to install, use and uninstall any Android application, just like physical Android device does.

Android Emulator runs at desktop OS like Windows, Linux or Mac, but simulates a sandbox of Android OS. For better performance, most of modern Android Emulators takes the advantage of hardware virtualization (Intel-VT or AMD-V) to simulate multiple cores, just like physical Android device does.

From Android’s perspective, it can access “devices”, including CPU, memory, screen orientation, Rom, SD card, WiFi, battery, camera, GPS, accelerometer, etc, although they are all simulated by software.

From Windows’ perspective, Android Emulator is just a normal Windows application like notepad, all Android data are stored in several files in a certain Windows folder, for example, all stuff in SD card is likely a 10 GB file.

Run and stop an emulator, and clear data

From the Virtual Device page, we can perform the following operation on emulator:

• o run an Android emulator that uses an AVD, double-click the AVD, or click Launch
• To stop the running emulator, right-click and select Stop, or click Menu ▼ and select Stop.
• If we want to clear the data from an emulator and return it to the initial state when it was first defined, then right-click an AVD and select Wipe Data. Or click menu ▼ and select Wipe Data.