Over the years many developers have debated the pros / cons of the official Android emulator, Genymotion, and hypothetical simulators
I'd like to propose another alternative: Google should produce a piece of reference hardware costing no more than $45 USD, along the lines of an Hardkernel ODROID C1, with the following characteristics: - Official support and images from Google to load onto this device (like when JBQ maintained AOSP for Beagle) - Low cost (look what these guys have done for $9 USD http://makezine.com/2015/07/22/with-linux-and-creative-commons-the-9-chip-computer-reveals-its-open-source-details/). Should be less than $45 USD so devs can acquire a few possibly configured with different versions of Android - A real environment, with real sensors including barometer, gyro, BLE, etc - VNC/RDP-like experience where device's screen is shown on desktop to dev can interact with it. - Easy to update with different versions of android; perhaps gradle targets to initialize/check HW for target API version What this would need: - MediaTek <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaTek>'s quad-core MT6582 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaTek#Quad-core> / Qualcomm 410 class CPU - Enough ram to comfortably run any version of Android (>1G) - 4-8G Storage - *All the typical sensors* - Bluetooth 4.x - Wifi - GPS - USB - 3.5mm Audio What this would not have: - Battery - LCD What this solves: Development for android, especially when using the interesting things like sensors, is either not possible with the emulator, or expensive because of the # of devices you need. You need at least one device, preferably a Nexus - and these have trended away from affordable to higher end & more costly. I can spend $200 to buy an iPod touch and get very far with that and iOS Simulator; you must spend more for Nexus unless you buy a budget device like Moto E / Moto G - which is not stock, and receives unknown updates (guaranteed at least 1, but who knows which one). Another idea: - Google could make available the affordable Android One devices marketed in India and other emerging markets to developers. - Google could take the Android One reference design, remove battery, screen, and 3G and use this as the base hardware I think its very nice that even Microsoft supports Raspberry Pi (Windows 10 IoT) - https://dev.windows.com/en-us/iot Since boards like the Raspberry Pi and Beagle do not have all the sensors of a typical Android phone, I think this disqualified them from being the foundation of any initiative like this. Thanks & regards -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "adt-dev" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
