Are there plans to support building for android_x86?

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11-21-2016 06:44 AM
JonathonGrivas
New Contributor III

I am doing cross platform development for Android and iOS using 10.2.6(patch 2) and I would like to utilize android emulators for testing. Unfortunately, android's ARMv7 emulators are extremely slow and building/deploying to them takes ages compared to the x86 ones. As asked in the title, is there any plan to support builds targeting android x86? 

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LucasDanzinger
Esri Frequent Contributor

Jonathon-

We don't currently have plans for this, but would like to see how much interest there was from the community on this. Is the use case for this primarily for testing on the simulators, or would this also be used for deployments?

- Luke

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LucasDanzinger
Esri Frequent Contributor

Jonathon-

We don't currently have plans for this, but would like to see how much interest there was from the community on this. Is the use case for this primarily for testing on the simulators, or would this also be used for deployments?

- Luke

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JonathonGrivas
New Contributor III

For us personally, at the moment, the use would be entirely for testing on the simulators. With so few x86 android devices out there we don't plan to deploy for them. I'd imagine the story is probably the same for others with this question, but I'm not sure.  This was purely just a convenience request, thanks for the response!

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JonathonGrivas
New Contributor III

Hello Lucas, since I asked this question have reviewed our tablet options and discovered quite a large number of tablets we would have liked to use if x86 were supported. Asus and Acer produce numerous x86 tablets at the moment.  The future of Intel Atom for android seems uncertain, but I'm wondering with the advent of Core M if we will see a transition to that for android tablets. 

As a side note, there is also libhoudini which allows x86 android devices to use libraries compiled for armv7. I discovered this when I was able to run an ArcGIS Qt app on an x86 android tablet without changing anything.  Unfortunately, the process isn't so smooth for the emulator and it looks like I would have to jump through some hoops to set it up. 

I just wanted to bump this thread again to let you know that we did consider using ArcGIS Qt in a production environment for X86 android, but are deterred due to the uncertainty of future support for this, lack of built in emulator support, and the potential performance drawbacks of libhoudini. 

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LucasDanzinger
Esri Frequent Contributor

Thanks for the feedback Jonathon. We are planning on supporting x86 Android with ArcGIS Runtime 100.1.