Android emulator support for Apple Silicon

[Reedyuk]

Use case

I would like to get the benefit of Apple Silicon's high performance on the ci and be able to use Android emulator.

Idea

I have some integration tests that require the Android Emulator, this is currently not supports by the mac_mini_m1 + m2's

[Ycoi]

Thanks for the feedback. There has been issues with Android Emulator on Apple Silicon because of lack of proper support by Android emulator itself. I’ll discuss this with the team and see if we can test this with the latest versions to see if they would be reliable enough by now.

[Ycoi]

I checked this with our engineering team and unfortunately the reason why we can’t run Android emulators on our Apple Silicon machines is that Apple virtualizarion framework doesn’t support nested virtualisation. And before Apple adds this support, we unfortunately can’t add support for Android emulators either.

M2 has hardware support for nested virtualization, but unfortunately macOS and Apple virtualization network still doesn’t support it. Hopefully this would chage in the future.

[Reedyuk]

thanks for the quick response. Is it worth leaving this request open until its supported?

[Ycoi]

Yes, let’s leave it open at least for now. That way we can track the request better. We can always close it later if it seems that Apple doesn’t add the support any time soon.

[Ycoi]

I thought about this a bit more and I think it makes sense to close this feature request since it doesn’t depend on us but on Apple. This is anyway so core functionality that if it just becomes possible, we will add the support.