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On the flip side, I guess ARM Macs will now allow the use of hypervisors for Android simulators, instead of a full hardware virtualization. ... thus making And

On the flip side, I guess ARM Macs will now allow the use of hypervisors for Android simulators, instead of a full hardware virtualization. ... thus making Android development better on Macs?

jeroenhd 6y ago
Android emulators on desktop generally run amd64 images of Android using existing virtualisation hardware and software. At best, you can say that you can run ARM-only games at native speed now, but as a developer you won't really notice much different (assuming the processors aren't slower than Intel's)
jayd16 6y ago
Android already had x86 builds and that was the preferred way to run the emulator so its mostly likely a neutral change (once they get hardware virtualization for arm working). The GPU aspect of things might improve maybe?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lfy_google 6y ago
Android Emulator developer here. In addition to what the other comments said about android emulation with hypervisors existing already for x86, we're also looking into the Hypervisor.framework API for Apple silicon. It won't be a trivial task (hoping for pre-existing code to port over maybe?) but we have the other pieces like using Hypervisor.framework for x86 already, and being able to cross compile the other code for arm64, so that would be the only major task left. On the subj. of better GPU support, it depends on what it's actually like using the drivers, but from previous experience with the GPUs and drivers shipped with macOS, there shouldn't be any special kind of trouble at least. We may have to use Metal if Apple also gets rid of opengl support on those new machines, but there are also existing translators for gles and vk to metal. The graphics hw itself, is actually the least of our worries due to how consistent the hardware is likely to be---we'd have to deal with a much fewer set of hw/driver quirks versus other host OS platforms.
- my123 6y ago
  Hello, OpenGL is deprecated but still supported on Apple Silicon, even for arm64 apps.
  - lfy_google 6y ago
    Nice, that's good news.

On the flip side, I guess ARM Macs will now allow the use of hypervisors for Android simulators, instead of a full hardware virtualization. ... thus making Android development better on Macs?

jeroenhd 6y ago

Android emulators on desktop generally run amd64 images of Android using existing virtualisation hardware and software. At best, you can say that you can run ARM-only games at native speed now, but as a developer you won't really notice much different (assuming the processors aren't slower than Intel's)

jayd16 6y ago

Android already had x86 builds and that was the preferred way to run the emulator so its mostly likely a neutral change (once they get hardware virtualization for arm working). The GPU aspect of things might improve maybe?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

lfy_google 6y ago

Android Emulator developer here. In addition to what the other comments said about android emulation with hypervisors existing already for x86, we're also looking into the Hypervisor.framework API for Apple silicon. It won't be a trivial task (hoping for pre-existing code to port over maybe?) but we have the other pieces like using Hypervisor.framework for x86 already, and being able to cross compile the other code for arm64, so that would be the only major task left. On the subj. of better GPU support, it depends on what it's actually like using the drivers, but from previous experience with the GPUs and drivers shipped with macOS, there shouldn't be any special kind of trouble at least. We may have to use Metal if Apple also gets rid of opengl support on those new machines, but there are also existing translators for gles and vk to metal. The graphics hw itself, is actually the least of our worries due to how consistent the hardware is likely to be---we'd have to deal with a much fewer set of hw/driver quirks versus other host OS platforms.

my123 6y ago
Hello, OpenGL is deprecated but still supported on Apple Silicon, even for arm64 apps.
- lfy_google 6y ago
  Nice, that's good news.