Hey Guys, as you know the Smartphone market is dominated by Android OS – which itself is an operating system designed / based on the linux kernel , but unfortunately the Android Emulators for Linux itself are quite less as compared to windows counterparts 🙁 . so let’s have a look on the 5 best Android Emulators for Linux to run android apps and play android games on Linux -Ubuntu,LinuxMint,Fedora,ArchLinux etc
1. Genymotion
Genymotion – This is probably the Best Android emulator when it comes to Linux Platform due to some unique abilities present only in genymotion, Features of Genymotion are —
- It allows us to easily Download pre-configured Android Images of various Android Versions and various Android device images such as Nexus 7,Galaxy S2,Galaxy S3 etc directly on our emulator.
- It also allows us to configure the amount of resources e.g RAM ,harddisk to be allocated to the Android device / Emulator. Great feature if limited on hardware resources.
- Genymotion directly supports networking through ethernet /Wi-Fi , emulates your connected connection directly so it use internet directly in the emulated android.
- ADB Support and it also supports OpenGL hardware acceleration so your Android device works fullscreen and thus enhancing your experience while playing android games on your Linux!
- It Also supports drag and drop file transfer to the emulated SD Card 🙂 , supports Gyroscope,Light and accelerometer sensors too.
- You need an account on Genymotion Cloud – to Download and deploy Genymotion android device —
- Click here to register on Genymotion site and download Genymotion for Linux [32 bit as well as 64bit].Note – Oracle Virtual Box must be installed on your Machine for Genymotion to work! , installing Virtual Box On Linux is covered at the end of this post 🙂
- Installation instructions for installing Geanymotion on Ubuntu/Archlinux are available here.
2.Andro VM
AndroVM is the Parent Project of genymotion – nevertheless it still works and works awesomely! and the best thing about Andro VM is that the android machine is deployed offline on your PC unlike Genymotion where it is deployed on your PC through cloud, thus you can use Andro VM to install Android Emulator on your linux even offline
- another striking feature of Andro VM is that it supports hardware OpenGL rendering through Virtual Box.
- Virtual Box must be installed on your Linux OS for Andro VM to run , check end of the post for Virtual Box installation tutorial .
- AndroVM supports Net Sharing from guest to host , the internet sharing as well as Installation tutorial for Andro VM is available here at their blog — > Click here for AndroVM installation tutorial
- AndroVM can be downloaded for both 32bit and 64-bit Linux Kernels from here –> Click here to download Andro VM Virtual Box image for Linux.
3. Andy Android Emulator by Andyroid.net – Andy OS
- Although, yet in Beta at the time of writing this article – ANDY OS Android Emulator is pretty much exciting and the best Android emulator for Linux ., being a beta tester i have the access to pre-release features of ANDY , hence i have given it the 3rd place, it could easily been the first one though!
- Features of ANDY emulator include Google Play Store support inbuilt, none of the emulator has this feature inbuilt even for Windows builds!
- Multi-Touch support 🙂 the word explains it all !
- Use your phone as a controller for controlling / playing the games, the picture alongside explains it 🙂
- Access the installed apps directly from the Desktop environment!
- OpenGL hardware acceleration, Camera and Microphone all features supported!
- You can download the beta version for Linux or the Windows build for Andy from here –> The link will automatically redirect you depending on your OS —
- Click here to download / Get ANDY OS!
You might want to check out this new emulator which runs directly inside Google Chrome Browser – ARChon! Android Emulator.
4. Official Android SDK – Android Emulator / AVDs
- The Official Android SDK/ Android emulator by Google, has a lot of fans though not me 😛 and is used by default by mostly anyone who wants to develop apps for Android
- This Android emulator supports all the functions including SD Card support, file transfer et
- It also supports physical keypad which none of the Android emulators support !!
- Being developed by Google Engineers you are assured of the quality of product and safety!
- The Setup of this emulator is the thing which doesn’t impress me much though 🙁
- An easier setup guide to install the Official Android Emulator can be read here .
- The required SDK / ADT bundle for Android emulator and plugins can be downloaded from this Google’s Official Page .
5. Jar of Beans – Wine Compatible!
- Although Jar Of Beans was developed as an Android Emulator which was Portable for Windows ,it can be run through Wine.
- It has all the basic support such as APK install, SD Card supports and supports installation of Play Store too..
- but already Wine being a kind of Emulation environment we wont encourage usage of Jar of Beans on Linux
- For using Jar of beans for Linux, extract the exe contents of the Jar of Beans.exe file which can be downloaded from here –> , and then by runnint the jarofbeans.exefile with wine .
- Click here to download Jar of Beans from Google Drive
Installing VirtualBox on Linux
- As, we mentioned we need to install virtual box on linux before using Genymotion/AndroVM/ANDY , the eaiest method to install virtualBox on linux is
- Installing the dependencies by executing “sudo apt-get install dkms” in terminal , and then by executing
“sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.3″ in the terminal! that’s it virtual box will be installed ! - If it doesn”t get installed you may want to check out this Article.
Update : You might love it to check out the New Firefox OS on PC – Click here to Configure Firefox OS Emulator on your Linux
If you have any doubts/queries/suggestions Feel free to Comment , we will try our Best to Please you Thanks!
It makes as easy as possible. I like this posting. Thank you for sharing with us.
Wtf????
Something wrong mate?
i dnt find a link
I’m getting an error when trying to install virtualbox. It can’t find the package.
which linux distribution are you using ?
In case you are using Fedora, replace “apt-get” with “yum”. So it would be “yum install dkms”.
Aaron lol
Same problem here as River. I am using Ubuntu.
Try just sudo apt-get install virtualbox instead of the other one.
@Amy_Lu_Who , VirtualBox is now providing direct debian packages for installing , Please download the appropriate debian package of virtualbox from here https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads
According to your Ubuntu version and hopefully,it will be installed 🙂
AndyOS is vaporware. Mid July has come and gone, no update on status,no info on website. Linux/Mac support page still says “Come back some time in Mid-July”
Did you get piad to include them?
Nopes, i didn’t get paid to include them 🙁
actually , i have the beta testing copy of AndyOS hence included it in the post. but ya nowadays we beta testers too stopped getting the updates from them 🙁
It would be really nice if you can include a link to download the app for testing here.. Because this software simply does not exist on the internet at the moment and would surely waste many people’s hours searching for something that’s not possible to be found.
Damn, will this Andy thing be out one day ? Stills ins dev, can’t wait for it !……
Same feeling here .. 🙁 got access only to the beta version 🙁 Waiting for final release since ages!! 🙁
It should probably be mentioned that the publisher of AndyOS has previously produced adware. Moreover, when confronted with this particular issue, the developers only had only bad excuses to offer, so it’s probably a good idea to avoid that for now.
References:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/2cslku/bluestacks_vs_andy_the_best_android_emulators_on/cjisln3
https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/2458sb/andy_a_new_android_emulator/ch3xgu0 (user eyalfishler is the dev)
AndyOS reeks of dodgy software to be honest. I installed it onto a windows virtual machine (after reading about the problem I am about to describe), and when I tried to uninstall it, I couldn’t. Windows Add/Remove said that I “didn’t have access rights to uninstall it”. That sounds like the software is doing something it shouldn’t. I’m just glad I installed it into a VM, so that I could just delete and recreate it. Wouldn’t put AndyOS anywhere near a proper installation after that.
whoa! Thanks a lot for this information i need running android on my linuxmint
Which one could run on centos?
Except that andyroid is not available for linux. It’s for win/mac and according to archive.org it always has been.
anyone can suggest me to choose emulator for low spec pc, 1,8 gb ram, intel celeron 1,5ghz (2)
Hello Ryan, recommending you to go with droid4x 🙂
Are you sure AndyOS is for linux as well? I cannot find link to download this version… http://bit.ly/getAndy just redirects to blank page
Hello mirec, unfortunately we too couldn’t download Andy for Linux at this time, but it was there at the time of writing this article. Hopefully it will be re-released soon 🙂
Still not possible to have stable AndyOS for ubuntu.
Hi Ryan, check out android-x86.org You can run it in a virtual machine or install it.
Genymotion is completely crippled unless you pay, not worth it. AndroVM is just more Genymotion crap, don’t bother. The Official SDK, which the author “doesn’t like”, lol, should be at the top of the list, but I suspect the author was paid to pump crappy payware. Droid4X didn’t work under Wine for me. Archon didn’t work either.
Command for installing VirtualBox 4.3 on Ubuntu 15
sudo sh -c “echo ‘deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian ‘$(lsb_release -cs)’ contrib non-free’ > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list” && wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add – && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.3 dkms
I’ve tried andydroid but there’s no linux installation file so the title is misleading
Great run down on the emulators. I am running Ubuntu 12.04 and installed VirtualBox and GenyMotion. The problem I am having is a custom phone or touch pad won’t run it comes up and says:
Unable to start the virtual device.
VirtualBox cannot start the virtual device.
To find out the cause of the problem, start the virtual device from VirtualBox.
For more information, check the log files. Please refer to: https://www.genymotion.com/#!/support?chapter=collapse-logs#faq
If I run Google Galaxy Nexus 4.3 api18 720X1280 it will come up but is painfully slow. I am running a pretty fast computer and especially on Linux.
Would it be a memory issue with the Genymotion or the Google Galaxy setup?
Thanks,
Kevin
It’s free for personal use!
Genymotion is worthless crap. Doesn’t install properly on Ubuntu.
Thanks!
in genymotion says:
The virtual device got no IP address.
The VirtualBox DHCP server has not assigned an IP address to the virtual device. To find a solution, please start VirtualBox.
For more information, please refer to: http://www.genymotion.com/faq/dhcp
which is android emulkator for redhat
I tried Andy OS on Win7 and it uninstalled my VMWare!!!!! BE WARNED cuz they don’t warn you!
Android is all about collecting consumer data. Which emulator sends my metadata where?