Android emulators

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Revision as of 18:46, 2 March 2017 by Memebeam (talk | contribs) (changed a few things with bluestacks)
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This page is about emulating Android apps and games on PC as it is slowly building off an important library of exclusives, and emulation coupled with CheatEngine is certainly interesting. If you're interested in emulators for your Android phone, check this page instead.

Android is a mobile operating system (OS) based on the Linux kernel and currently developed by Google. Unlike iPhone, as well as older cell-phone models and older Japanese Galapagos mobile phones, emulating Android software on PC is more developed, though no open source emulator with a high degree of game compatibility exists yet.

Like with DS emulators, the computer mouse is used to emulate touch screen presses (which can be less than ideal in many cases), and the keyboard emulates the button controller add-ons. Some emulators support X360 controllers as well with some more tweaks.

Android apps come in the apk file format (occasionally coupled with obb files). Just like its iOS equivalent (ipa files), their innards can be opened as a regular zip file.

Emulators

PC
Name OS Version Free VM Accuracy Recommended
Genymotion Windows, Mac, Linux 2.7.2 (Official Site) ✓ (Non-Dev Versions) VirtualBox High
BlueStacks Windows, Mac Official Site Original Mid
Droid4x Windows, Mac Official Site Original High
DuOS Windows Official Site ? Mid
andyroid Windows, Mac Official Site VirtualBox Mid
ARC Welder (Google Chrome) Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS 50.5021.602.0 (Official Site) Original Mid
Windroy Windows 1.2 (Discontinued) Original Low
Windroye Windows 2.9.0 (Discontinued) VirtualBox Mid ?
Android x86 Multi-platform 4.4-r5 (Official Site) N/A Low
Shashlik Linux 0.9.3 (Official Site) Original Low
Xamarin Android Player Windows, Mac Discontinued VirtualBox ?
Nox App Player Windows 3.7.5.1 ? High
Mobile
Name OS Version Free VM Accuracy Recommended
Project Astoria Windows 10 Mobile Discontinued Original Low

The VM column describes what backend technology the emulator uses. Emulators labeled with "VirtualBox" requires the user to install Oracle VM VirtualBox.

  • Genymotion is an Android emulator with hardware-accelerated 3D graphics and USB host support, available for Windows, Mac and Linux. In its latest versions, it has pretty good compatibility with commercial games. It's a commercial product though, aimed at software developers and QA teams. You'll need to create an account and download the free non-commercial use license available. Except for pay-to-remove "free for personal use" watermark on the screen, paid builds add features only useful for Android app developers.
    • Setting up the emulator itself is not too hard, but a bit of tinkering is required to add the Google Play store and ARM processor emulation (what you need essentially here to play the commercial releases) as well as Xbox 360 controller support. Not noob-friendly, but if you're experienced enough with Android to know your way around a rooted filesystem it shouldn't be too hard.
  • Bluestacks is also commercial with a free option (Requires a google account). It's less good than Genymotion, and doesn't handle USB cable emulation. Previous versions used to come with an installer with adware, comes with junk apps within the emulator, and has a non-intuitive uninstaller, but that's no longer the case today. It includes Google Apps by default, though you'll need to install a file manager to copy game cache when loading your own apks.
  • Droid4x has good accuracy but forcefully uninstalls VirtualBox, so it cannot co-exist with Genymotion and Xamarin.
  • andyroid works too, though the company behind it did adware before previously.
    • Just like Genymotion, Andyroid also use VirtualBox, but with a twist: if it detects an installed virtualbox during installation, it will delete it and will refuse to work. Beware!
  • DuOS, not to be confused with a similarly-named Nintendo DS emulator by Roor, is a relative newcomer to the Android emulation market, made by American Megatrends i.e. the very same people behind the BIOS/UEFI firmware your PC may be using. Emulation is modest at best, with games and apps such as DraStic struggling on lower-end hardware. And to top it all off, it ain't free either.
  • Windroy (without the 'e' suffix) is a fast Android emulator that does not rely on VirtualBox or any similar technology. It isn't accurate though. While Google Play store can be installed with some tinkering, not many games can be installed (due to not faking device names) and will spawn multiple harmless-yet-annoying app_process.exe crashes. Official site is down since July 2016, so any updates are unlikely.
  • Windroye (with the 'e' suffix) rely on VirtualBox, but still offers better performance than Bluestacks. The Play Store is installed by default and has no stability issues found from classic Windroy. A related Reddit topic can be found here.
  • Android x86 is a open-source project that aims to port Android operating system to x86-based netbooks. While it can be run on virtual machines like VirtualBox, it does not have 3D graphics emulation and cannot run most games. Genymotion is (or at least used to be) a closed-source fork of Android x86, designed exclusively to be run on VirtualBox.
  • Shashlik is a project by KDE that aims to run Android applications on Linux using KDE5 and Qt5 technology. The project is infancy state and only known to run on latest Kubuntu versions. It currently lacks ARM processor emulation, so not many games will run. It is however known to play Flappy Bird and can show Spotify's login screen. It uses modified Qemu to emulate the Android operating system.
  • Xamarin Android Player was a newcomer to the Android emulation market. Not much is known about this because it required a minimum of $25/month subscription of main Xamarin products. The main Xamarin products were made available for free after the purchase by Microsoft, but Xamarin Android Player was discontinued.
  • Project Astoria was a Microsoft-developed Android emulator for Windows 10 Mobile included in several insider previews. It could run a few applicaions, though apps required Google Play Services did not run or had issues. This project was reportedly discontinued in November 2015 and its cancellation was confirmed on February 2016, so the emulator is not included in more recent versions of Windows 10 Mobile.

Emulation issues

Lack of Release Notes and Update History information

While some emulators such as Genymotion do have version history on their website, most other emulators do not have such history pages, making it difficult to track updates as well as regressions.

Emulator Conflict

Many emulators, such as Droid4x, andyroid, Genymotion and Xamarin cannot co-exist on the same machine because they will uninstall each other. This can be a problem if one game runs only on one of these emulators but the other games do not work on it.

Google-related Libraries

Likely due to licensing issues, most Android emulators do not come with Google-related applications and related libraries preinstalled (Google Play Store, Play Services, Play Games client, etc) and requires the user to manually install them. Many games verify the existence of Google-related components at the start and refuse to work if some or any of them are missing.

ARM Applications

Most commercial games are developed and published only for devices with ARM CPUs such as most smartphones and tablets. However, the PCs we regularly use contain x86 CPUs, so these games cannot directly run. Some emulators like Bluestacks have ARM emulation by default, and in some others like Genymotion it is possible to install ARM emulator manually. The ARM emulator requires Intel CPUs to work correctly and not guaranteed to work with all games.

Games with root/Custom ROMs/Emulator Detection

Many commercial games refuse to run if the device is "rooted" (hacked to allow access to deep portion of Android OS) in order to reduce cheating and pirating. If the emulator is rooted by default, it must be unrooted manually before the game can be played.

Some games are very aggressive that they detect Custom ROMs (unofficial firmware) or Android emulators (like the ones listed in this page) by variety of ways like checking the existence and absence of system files in order to prevent the game from running in any unauthorized environments. These games are very difficult or plain impossible to play on emulators without resorting to cracked versions of the games.

See also