Friday, October 26, 2018

Emulator 28.0.14 Canary, 32-bit Windows deprecation

Emulator 28.0.14 is now available in the Canary and Dev channels.

Changes and fixes:
  • Fixed issue on Mac where timers would become unreliable, leading to hangs and other strange behavior. If you experience emulator hangs on Mac, please file an issue in Issuetracker.
  • Fixed issue where the virtual Android display would only show up in the top left corner. We believe this is due to misconfigured Qt environment variables.
    • The emulator now overrides all Qt scaling-related environment variables.
  • Fixed crashes on snapshot save.
  • On Linux, btrfs filesystems may cause extreme slowdowns due to auto-snapshot-saving mechanisms and the emulator already employing copy-on-write for its virtual disk devices. For users on btrfs or other copy-on-write filesystems, we recommend cleaning out the ~/.android/avd directory and running chattr +C on an empty ~/.android/avd.
    • In 28.0.14, new snapshots will be created in a folder where copy-on-write is disabled.
  • To address issues with running out of disk space on Play Store images, the emulator will automatically resize the userdata partition to 6 GB when running with a fresh Play Store AVD.
32-bit Windows deprecation

Due to low usage and maintenance costs, we are planning to deprecate the 32-bit version of the Android Emulator that runs on Windows. We will roll out a transition plan before removal and end-of-life for the 32-bit version of the Android Emulator. However, we are actively seeking any feedback or concerns with this future change. Please let us know in the Issuetracker if you currently rely on the 32-bit version of the Android Emulator that runs on Windows, and how we can work with you going forward.