Emulating the Android emulator

Lately I’ve been experiencing the Android emulator being very slow. I’m using Intel HAXM but still it was behaving rather slow. One way obviously is to use a real device to test on. However I do not like to leave my editor and to move away from the code to be able to test a certain feature. These should be as close as possible to each other so that I can more easily test the things that I’m making.

So that was not an option. Perhaps it would be possible to use a utility to mirror the screen of a real device and perhaps even control the device from that mirrored screen? Turns out that this is easily possible, even with an open-source tool.

The tool is called scrcpy. Setting it up is as simple as executing these commands:

• brew install scrcpy
• scrcpy If you have only one device connected.
• Otherwise scrcpy -s $serial will do the trick.

This will open up a window where everything that you will do on the device will be mirrored and you can also interact with this as you would normally with an emulator.