Most Android phones nowadays have more RAM than your laptop. That CPU is also 10+ years old and a phone running a Snapdragon 855 or 865 is going to perform 2-5x better depending on which exact chip you have and single vs multi core benchmarks. The Android emulator may not be the fastest thing in the world, but your 10 year old computer is certainly not helping.
I've never actually seen a smartphone with more than 4GB of RAM (mine has 2 GB and runs Android 9 in FullHD with perfect performance). Whatever, a huge amount of ram usually is used when running heavy apps. Running the basic system + a small app isn't supposed to take anything near 100% RAM or CPU.
An Android app I want to write is going to be a single form with some text fields and some buttons, it will have simple logic but it needs to run in background, be able to read a sensor, read/write some SQLite/CSV data and play a sound occasionally. No fancy graphics bells and whistles.
This seems like a very simple task to handle, I bet it's not going to take much RAM or CPU.
- Galaxy S9+ (2018): 6GB
- Galaxy S10 (2019): 6 or 8 GB
- Galaxy S10+ (2019): 8 or 12 GB
- Galaxy S20 (2020): 8 or 12 GB
- Galaxy S20 Ultra (2020): 12 or 16 GB
- OnePlus 3 (2016): 6 GB
- OnePlus 8 (2020): 8 or 12 GB
- LG G7 ThinQ (2018): 4 or 6 GB
- LG Velvet (2020): 8GB
- Pixel 4 (2019): 6GB
- Xiaomi Pocophone F1 (2018): 6 or 8GB
- Huawei Mate 20 (2018): 4 or 6 or 8GB
- Sony Xperia 1 (2019): 6GB
- Moto Razr (2020): 6GB
Pretty much every Android phone maker is producing phones with at least 6GB of memory now. The flagships are heading toward 12 and 16GB now. OnePlus had more than 4GB almost 4 years ago. Only Apple, who has the benefit optimizing its OS for a small set of hardware, seems to still be running on 4GB or less on all of its phones
You're trying to emulate an entire OS here. Android 10 requires a minimum of 2GB of RAM just on its own now. You have overhead for the emulation software itself on top of that, in addition to the memory needed by your computer's OS, your IDE, your browser, etc. Android Studio alone requires a minimum of 1GB and, at least in my experience, it will use that within 5 minutes of opening up.
Not to mention, even budget phones today are at least twice as fast as the CPU you're running.
You can't expect emulated software to run well on a computer that barely even meets the minimum requirements for that software. It's ludicrous.
> Pretty much every Android phone maker is producing phones with at least 6GB of memory now
Ok. I can see no reason to care about such though. What the heck do they need that for?
> You're trying to emulate an entire OS here.
But I emulate desktop Linuxes and Windows without problems - that's entire OSes too.
> Android 10 requires a minimum of 2GB of RAM just on its own now.
Why? What does it need this much for? Anyway, I can reserve 2GB of RAM now and I'm sure I'm not going to notice too much drop in performance.
> You can't expect emulated software to run well on a computer that barely even meets the minimum requirements for that software. It's ludicrous.
As for the app - I'm sure it can't require anything near that much. As for the OS - why does Android have to require so much more than Linux and Windows do?
BTW my actual phone (Galaxy Note 3) runs Android 9 on 3 GB RAM perfectly. I never tried 3D games but everything else is blazing fast. I've been updating it (Android 4-5-6-9) for years and never noticed a glitch.
> Ok. I can see no reason to care about such though. What the heck do they need that for?
> Why? What does it need this much for?
As a developer, that shouldn't matter to you. Only that it _does_ require that much. You can assume that your users will have 4GB of memory in almost all cases now, whether you agree with it or not. Your opinion on the _why_ is irrelevant, frankly.
If you can't provide that much to the emulator, you can't expect to run it smoothly. There is no magic solution to this. These things require resources that your computer does not have. If you want it to run better (or even at all), get better hardware. That's all there is to it.
