Due to the overhead of translating an entire system’s worth of ARM instructions to x86, emulator system images with full ARM emulation tend to run much slower than x86-based system images when run on x86 host machines. Previously, if you wanted to get around this limitation and execute an app built for ARM on your x86 machine, you would have had to use an emulator system image with full ARM emulation.

This is a problem if you develop on a computer with an x86-based processor, as it would prevent you from running your app. Mobile phones tend to have ARM processors consequently, many C++ dependencies you might add to your app, like a camera barcode scanner library, are only compatible with ARM processors. This means that it needs to be compiled differently based on the architecture of the target device.

Unlike Kotlin or the Java programming language, both of which execute on the Android Runtime (ART), any C++ in your Android app compiles directly into machine instructions. The significance of this may require a bit of context, especially if you build apps exclusively with Kotlin or the Java programming language. The new Android 11 (Google APIs) x86 system image supports ARM ABIs, while the older Android Oreo system image does not Details This allows the execution of ARM binaries for testing without the performance overhead of full ARM emulation.

The new Android 11 system images are capable of translating ARM instructions to x86 without impacting the entire system. Previously, developers who were dependent on ARM libraries and could not build an x86 variant of their app either had to use system images with full ARM emulation, which are much slower than x86 system images when run on x86-based computers, or resort to physical devices. As part of the Android 11 developer preview we’ve released Android 11 system images, which are capable of executing ARM binaries with significantly improved performance.

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