Development activity
A project’s activity may sway your decision to use the software – or not.
When using the software, we want to know how problems can be solved. For this to happen, we need support or ongoing development. In the case of the emulators in this Roundup, as expected, Genymotion and Google’s own are the most active. However, Genymotion has a significant investment in cloud and other professional solutions, so hobbyists may be left behind in its corporate wake. AndroidVirtualDevice is of course also strong in this regard.
With the other projects, things are less clear and we need to check activity on their public web pages and GitHub.
Android_x86 released a new version in June of this year and may have released one more before this article is published. This project is very active – indeed, it seems to be unstoppable. These are exciting times for its developers and supporters. If you want to help with development, the source tree is over 10GB so make sure you have the disk space.
Anbox has activity on a daily basis and commits to the source weekly – this project might actually take off! It would be a valuable addition to the list software for Linux. This is especially useful when you already use the application on your phone and want to keep using the same interface. Many Android applications use very little memory and are very efficient. If you’re interested in helping out, the instructions are simple if you already know how to use Git.
Shashlik has no obvious activity on its web page nor GitHub for two years. Sadly, we may have to recognise the demise of this project. The code is still available on GitHub if any brave souls with time on their hands want to take over development.