Android development, VirtualBox and KVM

Few times already in the past couple years I tried doing some development for Android, but most of the time I decided to postpone that for another piece of undefined time.

The reason was that I always had issues with setting up the virtual device for debugging. And without debugging there is no development.

So, what was the problem? I always used a VirtualBox machine for development, having Windows as host and Ubuntu as guest. But to run AVD (Android Virtual Device), Linux uses KVM infrastructure; and according to StackOverflow, KVM can’t be run together with VirtualBox.

Although, KVM can be emulated, but then AVD is extremely slow (which I observed on the previous computer).

helloworldrealdevice

Solution? I pulled from the shelf one of my old Android phones (not to kill the tablet accidentally) and configured it to be a debugging device instead of AVD. Bingo 🙂

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