Documentation and support

As expected, the commercial solutions have the best help on tap.

Documentation is usually the weak point in hobby projects, which is a pity when the solutions they come up with are so elegant. This Roundup found similar results, AndroidVirtualDevice has all the documentation and support you can dream of, and when you use it together with AndroidStudio it’s even better. Genymotion has a great FAQ with the essential solutions to get you started, and if you’re going pro there’s a paid version. The documentation is top class and is clearly aimed at active developers. It’s the best around.

Android_x86 is very mature and has fantastic documentation, with a great FAQ. Community help is via Google Groups. It’s active and can help you when you run into problems.

Anbox is so new there’s even documentation for getting it installed and started. Yet even though the FAQ is reasonably clear, other documentation is sparse. We can forgive the lack of documentation because the software is pre-alpha, so most functions haven’t been written, let alone documented. We hope that work on Anbox continues because it’s an efficient way to bring Android applications to Linux. If you want to contribute to its development, see the help page. With only 1.5GB download for Anbox itself, the only thing you need to consider is the Android development tree. Shashlik has mastered the install of the Apks but the program isn’t all that well documented.