CHAPTER 2: Configuring Your Android App Development System 41The next thing that we need to address in optimizing your Eclipse ADT IDE for Android development
during the course of this book is creating and installing an AVD. AVDs will be used during the
Android software development process to accelerate the development process. The reason an AVD
accelerates development is because you don’t have to go through the time-consuming process of
transferring your application over the USB cable to the Android device every time you want to test!
You can create an AVD to serve as a software emulator for each of the Android hardware products
or “devices” that you will be developing for, and need to test your application on. You can also
create AVDs for device hardware that you don’t own, which makes development and testing more
affordable for everyone. Let’s learn how to create an AVD and set it up for use in the next section of
this chapter.
Android Virtual Devices: Creating the AVD
Eclipse ADT provides developers with a unique hardware emulation capability that speeds up your
application development cycle of design, code, and test. This is done by allowing you to test your
application using an AVD, which is a software emulator for any given Android hardware device (AHD).
If you are developing for the real-world market, you will eventually need to test your applications
on all the real-world AHDs that you wish your application to run on. The AHD application testing
process, as you might imagine, can quickly become an expensive and time-consuming proposition.
The reason that you don’t want to test across these AHDs every time you want to test an upgrade
to your app design or code is because that would involve connecting each of these AHDs that you
want your application to support to your development workstation via USB, and then uploading a
compiled APK (Android Package) to the AHD, and then test it using that hardware. You will learn all
about the APK format in Chapter 5 when we cover the Java programming language in detail.
An AVD installed in Eclipse shortens this lengthy external device testing process to zero seconds! An
AVD does this by allowing you to right-click on your Android app project folder in Eclipse, at any time
during your development work process, and selecting the Eclipse Run As ➤ Android Application
menu command sequence, which is accessed with a right-click on your Android project’s root folder.
This work process will automatically compile and transfer your Android application into your
currently active Android Virtual Device emulator, which we will be setting up in the next section of
this chapter.
Figure 2-10. The Google USB Driver as installed after progress bar disappears