You can also send fake text messages to the emulator. There are plenty of useful reasons to do this, however I wanted to pretend that Donald Drumph texted me about his day.

It Can Emulate Your Fingerprint

Most modern smartphones have a fingerprint scanner on them so it only makes sense that the emulator could emulate your fingerprint too. This is incredibly useful when you need to test RxFingerprint. Shout out to Charles Schwab for still not having fingerprint authentication on Android even though there is a really awesome library out there for making it easy.

It Can Emulate Sensors

Smartphones have sensors on them. These sensors can detect everything from movement to relative humidity, and the emulator can emulate all of those things. Admittedly I have not had much use for this section but it’s so darn cool I feel obligated to talk about it.

The accelerometer lets you emulate device rotation as well as movement. While it gives you fairly technical terms like yaw, pitch, and roll, the live preview lets you see exactly what happens when those metrics are changed. It also allows you adjust the movement of the device so you can move it along an X and Y axis. If you’ve ever had to test out accelerometer data and haven’t used the emulator, you probably worked harder than you needed to.

The emulator also provides you with additional sensors. This means you can adjust things like ambient temperature, magnetic field, light, relative humidity, and pressure.

Yeah, But The Emulator Camera Doesn’t Work

Back in 2015 I had the chance to visit the Microsoft campus in Redmond to discuss issues I’ve had as an Android developer. After discussing these issues I was able to see demos of everything they working on to make my life easier. The thing that blew me away was their emulator could use the webcam so when you opened the camera it would display something as opposed to an emulated camera.

Come on Google, get it together!

If you are working on an app which requires the use of the camera, you most likely need to use a physical device for testing. This is one of the most annoying things with the Android emulator, especially since you can setup the emulator to use your webcam, yet it still uses the emulated camera.

Oh wait, it does work.

Okay so the emulator actually does use your webcam now. I’m not quite sure when this started working, I checked tonight and was shocked to see that it actually worked. So yes, the emulator can now use your webcam. Good job Google.

Boot Up An Emulator

If you haven’t already, boot up an emulator and poke around, you’ll be surprised by how well it works now. Not only that but this article only talks about the stuff you can do within the emulator settings. You can also drag and drop files into the emulator (yes, even apks) so it’s much easier to add files for testing or installing third party apps to see how it interacts when they are installed. Sure the emulator doesn’t have a PDF reader installed, but if you have the apk for one you can easily install one yourself.

I really hope this article was helpful to those of you that may have given up on the emulator. I used to hate the emulator too, but in 2017 it’s a very capable tool that every Android developer should make use of.