Android application developers frequently complain about the poor performance emulator that is included in the platform’s SDK. The animated transitions and other graphically-intensive characteristics of the user interface introduced in Android 3 and 4 have only exacerbated the problem.

Developers can breathe a little easier now, because Google’s efforts to improve the emulator are finally paying off. An entry that was published today on the official Android Developer blog highlights several major changes that will make the emulator much more pleasant to use.

The new system image bundled with the emulator can use the host computer’s GPU to perform hardware-accelerated rendering. As you can see in a demo video that Google published, this will make the animations much smoother. The user experience in the emulator will now be much closer to that of running Android on actual hardware.

Another recent improvement is optional support for running x86 images that natively access the host computer’s CPU. This can help improve the performance for processor-intensive applications because it avoids the overhead of having to interpret ARM CPU instructions.

Using a virtualized x86 instance of Android for faster performance during testing is a trick that application developers have been using for a long time with third-party system builds. The availability of x86 Android in the standard emulator interface through the SDK management tool will make this capability more easily accessible to application developers.

The x86 image and support for hardware-accelerated rendering will largely address the long-standing complaints about Android emulator performance. As Google works to attract more developers to the platform, these kinds of improvements to the developer experience are going to help.