In an experimenting mood? How about trying an x86 emulator on Bitrise? 👨🔬
Do not try this at home! I mean, do try this, but only if you know what you are doing.
Android emulators are often problematic, as I'm sure you are well aware. Bitrise runs VMs and so far we couldn't run other virtualizations on them (no virtception, sorry), only emulators requiring only emulation, such as running armv7-a emulator on a x86 VM host.
This emulation was soooo slow. 🐌 But from now on - as an experiment - we allow nested virtualization, which means that we can use the virtualization that the host machine has for running an emulator with x86 architecture. And we can thus skip the slow emulation. 🎉 This is still 10-15% slower than when run on a physical machine, but it is still sooo much faster than the armv7-a emulator.
This feature is now available on Android stacks. You can start emulators, but our current steps do not support this yet, so you can start playing with it only using a script step.
Let us know what you think and experience. ☣
P. S.: You already know about our Virtual Device Testing for Android feature, right? 😊
