Simon LeonardTable of Contents
A significant surge in the development and evolution of mobile applications has been witnessed. As the usage of mobile phones is seen everywhere, mobile applications have continued to grow. Apps are just a click away and are extensively used; to buy groceries or play games.
For these apps to be efficient, they need to be up to the mark. As a result, all applications must go through a rigorous testing phase to make sure there aren’t any vulnerabilities before it is launched. Testing pinpoints unusual or unexpected behavioural patterns.
What is an Emulator?
To test Android apps without having a physical device, an Android emulator simulates and replicates the software and hardware of Android devices on your computer. Device emulators simulate the browser environment as well as an entire device.
Emulators are inexpensive and are easily accessible. Although, they have significant device software and hardware limitations. Because of this, a mobile application may pass the test on Android emulators but could fail on an actual device.
If you need to test a particular app, Android Emulators can help pick up any problems, such as production defects. It creates hardware conditions virtually of an Android device; this is used for testing and debugging purposes. Cloud-based emulators allow automating unit tests for a website across different platforms.
Given below are the top Android Emulators in the market currently.
Appetize
It is a browser-based emulator and is compatible with JavaScript and HTML5, and caters to Android. It is the best solution as you will need to upload the application on the website. It’s smooth sailing from then on.
LambdaTest
Offering 3000+ browsers and operating systems combinations, LambdaTest helps users to perform both manual and automated cross-browser testing. It allows users to record videos of complex bug issues and share them through Slack, MS teams, and more.
Testing can be sped up by users by running tests simultaneously. Cross-browser testing is facilitated on many mobile browsers, such as Google Chrome, Safari, and Mozilla Firefox. Added benefits of testing both private and locally hosted pages are provided by the Lambda tunnel feature.
LambdaTest guarantees that every bug is eliminated from all applications and websites and runs smoothly. Developer tools that are built-in aid in debugging in real-time.
Although it is a feature-rich emulator, it is easy to use. There are free and paid versions available. It stands out because of its highly effective OpenGL graphic cards, making it one of the fastest and best Android emulators to use. There are plugins for both Android Studio, Android SDK, and Eclipse.
Apart from this, Genymotion is available on numerous operating systems such as OS X, Windows, and Linux. By using the ADB tunnel, ADB commands can also be performed.
SauceLabs
Allows running unit tests within an emulator. This proves to be very useful to script a flow throughout a website, and you can watch a video recording of this later on via different devices. Manual testing of a site can also be done.
When running tests on mobile apps, Saucelab’s Android simulators are economical in their approach as their emulators let you perform cross-browser testing at great speeds and are priced quite reasonably compared to real devices.
In the case of mobile test automation, SuaceLabs is probably the best one out there.
BrowserStack
For manual testing, this is the easiest to use. Select an operating system, device type, then a browser version, choose a URL to browse, and then a hosted virtual machine comes up that is interactive.
It lets you open many emulators at once on the same screen, making it easy for you to test your app’s look and feel on multiple devices simultaneously. You can even run tests on multiple desktop browsers. This ensures that the software exceeds customer and organizational expectations. You can easily switch in between mobile and PC.
BrowserStack is innovative and unique to mobile emulators of Google Android and is close to being exactly the same as the real devices. It trumps other emulators as being the most credible mobile and web testing platform.
Boasting a flexible, versatile, and user-friendly interface along with an amazing API makes the job way easier.
Selenium WebDriver
The power of Selenium with Appium, in cross-browser testing, can be worked on mobile devices and mobile browsers, more importantly, performing mobile cross-browser testing across device configurations and different browsers.
Android Studio
It caters especially to developers is an Integrated Development Environment or IDE from Google itself. It has many plugins and tools and plugins to build and test apps. If we made a comparison to Genymotion, there are less features. But even with the tougher setup, it has a built-in emulator and is still a fav of many who use it.
Wrapping up, these are some of the best Android emulators. A word of caution, these emulators are not completely bug-free and may lag here and there. Keeping in mind, it can be very pricey to maintain a real Android device lab, with constant device upgrades on new device releases and regular upkeep costs. So not surprisingly, many users opt for an Android Emulator online.
Simon Leonard