With contributions from Intel, the emulator in Android Development Toolkit (ADT) 17 now supports “running x86 system images in virtualization mode on Windows and Mac OS X”. This can be used with Intel Virtualization Technology or AMD Virtualization, though the latter only works with Linux. The AVD must target x86 and must be run on real hardware, that is to say it cannot be run inside another virtual machine.

An experimental graphics accelerator is also available. This requires an AVD that targets “Android 4.0.3 (API Level 15), revision 3 or higher”.

ADT 17 brings with it a radically expanded version of Lint. Lint is described as,

Lint is a static checker which analyzes Android projects for a variety of issues around correctness, security, performance, usability and accessibility, checking your XML resources, bitmaps, ProGuard configuration files, source files and even compiled bytecode.

This version of Lint includes API version checks, performance checks, and many more. Another importance change to Lint is the ability to ignore a specific warning using @SuppressLint annotation.

The build support has added support for “custom views with custom attributes in libraries. Layouts using custom attributes must use the namespace URI http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto instead of the URI that includes the app package name. This URI is replaced with the app specific one at build time.”