Setting up AVD for testing

AVDs are used to virtually test the app on your PC. You may not have different versions of Android with different screen resolutions. To overcome this issue, AVDs are used to virtually create a number of devices and test whether the app runs perfectly on a particular version of Android. One thing to note is that AVDs are much slower compared to physical devices. Now, let's create an AVD to test our Google Maps Android application. The AVD Manager looks a bit different in Android Studio than in the traditional one. There are two different targets of an AVD, they are:

The different architectures available are x86 and ARM.

Setting up AVD from Android Studio

In this section, we will set up AVD from the Android Studio IDE by performing these steps:

1. Open AVD Manager in Android Studio by navigating to Tools | Android | AVD Manager. The following window will appear:
   

   AVD Manager

2. The following screenshot shows how to select the virtual device:
   

   Selecting the virtual device

3. The next step is to select a system image. The following window will appear. Select a system image with the Google APIs target. The x86 system images have better emulation speed than an ARM system image. Then, select Next.
   

   Selecting the API target

4. In the next screen, you can change some advanced settings. They are:
   • You can change the amount of RAM of your virtual device
   • You can change the internal and SD storage size
   • You can use your PC's webcam to support the Android camera
   • Enabling host GPU helps for better emulation speed as it uses your PC's graphics processor to render

   The following screenshot shows these additional options:

   

   Additional options

5. After changing the settings, finally select Finish. You will see a screen with a list of virtual devices created. To start a virtual device, press the green button under the Actions section.
   

   Created AVD

It may take some time for the emulator to start according to the speed of your PC.

The preceding screenshot shows an emulator running Android Lollipop 5.0 with the Google API.