{"id":2415,"date":"2016-10-18T04:40:42","date_gmt":"2016-10-18T04:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.couchbase.com\/blog\/?p=2415"},"modified":"2025-06-13T20:52:50","modified_gmt":"2025-06-14T03:52:50","slug":"android-emulator-tips-genymotion-google-play-services","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.couchbase.com\/blog\/android-emulator-tips-genymotion-google-play-services\/","title":{"rendered":"Android Emulator Tips – Genymotion and Google Play Services"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wanted to make note of a couple of quick tips for Android development around emulators.<\/p>\n

The standard Android emulator can be painfully slow.\u00a0Genymotion<\/a>\u00a0makes a drop-in replacement that\u2019s blazingly fast. I\u2019ve used it for years, and highly recommend it for any serious developer.<\/p>\n

Genymotion achieves this by running an x86 version of Android in Virtualbox. This has a couple of implications.<\/p>\n

Services on localhost<\/h3>\n

Virtualbox has several networking modes used to expose a guest virtual machine (in this case, an emulated Android device). Genymotion sets up two, a NAT service to connect to the outside world, and a \u201chost-only\u201d (HO) device. The HO device allows connecting to the host machine.<\/p>\n

The connection happens through a virtual interface named \u201cvboxnet0\u201d. To connect to a service on the host machine, you need to use the IP address of this interface. I find this generally ends up as 192.168.56.1. To check, you can use any tool that lists the information for your network interfaces. For example, on Linux or OSX, you can use ifconfig. You should see something like this:<\/p>\n

$ ifconfig
\n\u2026<\/p>\n

vboxnet0: flags=8943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0ether 0a:00:27:00:00:00\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0inet 192.168.56.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.56.255<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The number after \u201cinet\u201d is the IP address you need.<\/p>\n

Google Play Services<\/h3>\n

Many apps depend on\u00a0Google Play (GP) services<\/a>. Genymotion doesn\u2019t ship with GP. Fortunately, you can install a bundle containing GP yourself.<\/p>\n

This is really easy to do. Many write-ups will tell you to install both an ARM-x86 translator, and an ARM version of GP. That\u2019s no longer necessary.\u00a0https:\/\/opengapps.org\/<\/a>\u00a0hosts both ARM and x86 versions. To get GP loaded, follow these steps:<\/p>\n