What Is Emulator? How to create Emulator?
As a Mobile Application Developer we have to test our application with different mobile, either for different screens or for different OS. Is it possible for us to have all those types of Mobile and Tablets or wearables to test our app with? It's big, no… Even if you think you are too rich to afford, you can't have everything.
So how to check our application is running as expected in different Screen? The answer is to use Emulator.
What Is Emulator?
The emulator is Software which behaves like a physical mobile device to test our application. It provides an interface to run our application as if we could do with the actual Mobile. So, we can say that it is a Virtual device
We can set up an emulator to be different phones models, we can't afford such costly devices, but we can actually test in emulator that how our app will look at them. Isn't is cool?
For running iOS application, you will need a simulator. Which is same as an emulator, but provide functionality related to the iOS based Environment for our applications.
How can we create Emulator in Android Studio?
Think you will have created your First Flutter Application and screen on android studio will be something like this :
You will find an icon like highlighted here. We know it as Android Virtual Device Manager. Click on that.
For Android we will create emulator or we can say a virtual device from AVD manager. We can create as many as we want to create.
Now it will open a screen as below. Click on create virtual Device button.
It will show Hardware Configuration screen like this
You can choose the category like you want an emulator for TV, Phone, Wear OS for Watches and other Smart devices, Tablet or any automotive Devices.
I want for Mobile device so click on mobile. Here you will see lots of mobility specifications are available. You can select your desired device to test your application.
For Trial, you can import or create a new hardware profile with custom specification. Also, you can clone device.
Now click on next, you will see system image specification window will open
Here you can select the operating system of an Android mobile. If you have downloaded none of system image, you will require a download. Select it and click on next.
Provide it any name as you like, you can change mobile specification or system image. You can select mode as portrait mode or landscape mode for a virtual machine. Also can add some advance setting for your emulator. Right now we don't require advance features so we will not worry much about such things, so click on finish.
It will take a while to create a Virtual Device or we can say our Emulator is ready.
Now Whenever you open AVD Manager, you will see List of all your Virtual devices. Click on the play icon to start it. You can edit and delete it from here.
You can use other Virtual device Provider Like Genymotion, Bluestack to test your Application
