Has anyone else tried Genymotion for Android testing?

[Brent LaVelle]

We recently got a new Android developer on the team that showed us Genymotion and it makes working with virtual Android as enjoyable as Apple's iOS simulator.  I've been using it instead of my Nexus 4 for test development in Appium.  I didn't see any mention of it in this group so I wanted to share.  This emulator is lightning fast.  I'm going to try to add it to our Jenkins server today.

[bootstrap online]

When I benchmarked Genymotion, it was slower than the regular
emulator. The sign up process is also a pain.

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[Anil Kumar]

How do you enable developer options such as USB debugging in Genymotion simulator? Worth to note, it is faster than android stock emulator, only when you are not using intel's accelerator. When I use intel's accelerator, even stock emulator works as fast as android emulator. 

[Brent LaVelle]

The images that I pulled from genymotion already had debug enabled.

I guess I need to get timing data for my app between the built in emulator and the genymotion emulator.  The biggest problem I had with the google emulator is that none of my developers wanted to touch it, they love the genymotion one.

[Brent LaVelle]

I benchmarked the emulator that came with Android Studio (AVD) and friends, against Genymotion, a Nexus 4 and a $40 iView 3.4" 'tablet' all times in seconds, the first 2 tests has the apk already on the device.

  Device         One search test  All search tests  Installing the HomeAway apk

  AVD            44               Failed            I gave up
  Genymotion     11               174                3

  S4             20               253               10

  iView          30               460 failed 1 test 16

The AVD was an S4 x86 running 4.2.2 api 17 with hardware acceleration enabled.  This might be my problem as there were many options I picked what looked like the fastest.  I had several problems with the emulator not working or timing out.  Once it went unresponsive and I had to force quit the application.  I noticed the logcat going nuts when tests were running against AVD.  For the final install test where Appium pushes the apk onto the device I was unable to start the emulator from Android Virtual Device Manager.  It seems to get a SEGV in the main thread right off the bat so I just gave up.  The one iView test that failed is doing a 'world search' so I should probably raise the timeout for searching above 20 seconds.

[bootstrap online]

A properly configured emulator will outperform Genymotion. Try this config:
https://github.com/appium/ruby_console/blob/master/img/avd_settings.png

[Ling-Yi Kung]

Hi Brent,

I was wondering how you're using Genymotion with your Appium tests? What extra steps need to be done for Appium to communicate with Genymotion? We're looking into using it as supplement to our physical devices.

[Brent LaVelle]

No extra steps.  Once you have it running adb will see it like any other virtual or real device.  This thing is fast with the images I have and seems a bit more stable than the Google emulator.

You do have to install VirtualBox, the App then get the images you want to use but I managed to figure it out quickly.

[Vic Wong]

In my experience, genymotion outperforms even an Android SDK emulator configured with a lot of RAM, HAX, and GPU acceleration. It starts in 15 seconds on average, compared to 30 secs for avds. Anecdotally, the animation and performance seems a lot zippier to me. I've used a lot of different AVD emulator configs.

It's also more stable over long test runs, as I was getting adb hangs over time with the Android SDK. Definitely worth checking out.

-v

[Maria Machlowska]

Hi Brent!
I have a little bit diefferent question.
I am trying to run my test on genymotion simulator (android 4.3), but appium does not perform any action on my UI elements.
I mean if I click on a link it doesn't skip to specified screen.

Appium properly finds an element (by ID), but the any  actions could not be performed on them. So how do you find the UI elements? Are you using appium inspector, or any other tool (maybe can you find the proper xpah's of your app UI elements?).

I would be really gratefull for any information from you.
Thanks!

[Brent LaVelle]

Maria, I have not seen anything like that.  I've been off testing the mobil APIs and am back now.  However Genymotion is at version 2+ and now costs €300 per user per year.  On top of that I wasn't able to get it stable enough for automated tests so I'm going to try to get the Google emulator running again.  :(

[Vignesh Radhakrishna]

genemotion is better than the normal emulators , it loads the app faster and performs the operations , i have used it and found a good result.. if appium inspector does not provide u better id or class name go with UIAutomator and get the relevant id to automate

[Vivek Soundararajan]

Hi Barent 

     I am trying to automate an application using appium with genymotion emulator. I am very new for appium, and I don't know how to connect appium with any virtual devices or any other emulators, give me some basic instructions to automate an android application. 

[Subashni Prasanna]

hi 

i am also trying to start genymotion emulator using appium app in mac .. i am getting the following issue

ebug: 0 emulator(s) connected

debug: Launching Emulator with AVD @genymotiontest, launchTimeout 120000ms and readyTimeout 120000ms

debug: Checking whether emulator is present

debug: Using emulator from /Users/guesttest/Downloads/adt-bundle-mac-x86_64-20140702/sdk/tools/emulator

debug: Trying to find genymotiontest emulator

debug: Getting connected emulators

debug: Getting connected devices...

debug: executing: "/Users/guesttest/Downloads/adt-bundle-mac-x86_64-20140702/sdk/platform-tools/adb" devices

debug: 0 device(s) connected

debug: 0 emulator(s) connected

error: Unable to start Emulator: PANIC: Could not open: genymotiontest

debug: Trying to find genymotiontest emulator

debug: Getting connected emulators

debug: Getting connected devices...

debug: executing: "/Users/guesttest/Downloads/adt-bundle-mac-x86_64-20140702/sdk/platform-tools/adb" devices

is any one tried using the appium how to start the emulator .