Genymotion emulator

Genymotion is a software company making one of the fastest Android emulators and a couple of other products around it. For this book and our testing activities, we will use the Genymotion emulator personal use version, as it's a faster alternative to Android Virtual Devices. However, I strongly recommend that you get in touch with Genymotion to validate whether you need to purchase a license (individual or enterprise) once you finish using the personal version.

One can download the Genymotion installer to their machine from the website https://www.genymotion.com/ after signing up, and then perform the installation. Once installed, we need to sign in with Genymotion account details. Post that, we need to create virtual devices. The illustrated screenshot shows the Genymotion app with a couple of virtual devices already configured; however, it will be empty for the first time user:

Let's learn to create virtual devices in Genymotion:

1. Launch the Genymotion app and log in with your registered credentials.
2. Click on Add +.

1. Select the Android version and Device model from the dropdown:

1. Select Android version as 5.1 and choose Device Model to be Google Nexus 6.
2. Click on Next.
3. It will start the download of the virtual device.
4. Once done, click on Finish to close the download window.
5. The virtual device will start appearing on the Your virtual devices window.
6. Click on Start to launch the virtual device.

Starting the emulator will show a screen similar to the following:

Launch the terminal and run the adb devices command; the output will be as shown:

So, each emulator runs as a virtual machine on your physical machine. To install the app on Genymotion emulator, the normal adb commands--adb install /path/to/app/<app_name>.apk will work fine.