Android virtualization with Genymotion and VirtualBox

Power and Play Store

Developers and experts can definitely benefit from a virtual machine. Android users especially benefit from the Play Store integration in the Genymotion VMs (Figure 3) and the typical buttons in the user interface. In the virtual machine, you can experiment safely with unknown or suspicious apps without in any way compromising your smartphone.

Figure 3: Genymotion, unlike the Android SDK emulator, can run the Google Play Store.

Genymotion might not provide the option of doing snapshots of virtual machines in its user interface, but that doesn't present a problem with the VirtualBox back end, as with other desktop and server systems. You can back up a preconfigured machine and return to its previous state with just a few clicks. In VirtualBox itself, you also have option of archiving the VM with your demo app and passing it to other interested parties.

Conclusion

The virtual Android's performance naturally depends heavily on the host system, but the virtual Genymotion's Android emulator runs quite a bit faster and more smoothly than Google's Android emulator, even on older machines.

Developers will also find that the Genymotion API can access the Android VM interactively and thus emulate some features such as NFC through software. l

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