Emulator 27.2.7 is now available in the Canary channel. It contains the following changes:

Fixed issues with some parts of the emulator UI being unresponsive if the Extended controls window was not opened at least once.

To address concerns of excessive memory usage, loading and saving of AVD snapshots has been optimized to only use RAM that is currently in the guest working set. This applies to Quick Boot snapshots saved automatically and to snapshots saved and loaded using the Save now and Load now buttons in the Settings panel of the Extended controls window.

On Windows with HAXM 7.2.0, AVD snapshot loads are optimized to load memory on demand, greatly decreasing snapshot load times. (HAXM 7.2.0 is not yet publicly released.)

Improved performance with Skia: For Android 8.1 (API 27) and Android P images, Android Emulator can render the Android UI with Skia. With Skia, UI rendering is smoother and uses fewer resources.

Currently, to use Skia, you need to manually enable it with the following commands in an adb shell:



su





setprop debug.hwui.renderer skiagl





stop





start



In upcoming Android P images and later, Skia will become the default renderer. Skia uses more OpenGL features than the current solution, so it’s important for us to get thorough test coverage across real-world scenarios. We would like to get feedback on this change as early as possible. Please file an issue if you experience problems with it.