CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidandroid-emulator
john-salib
john-salib

Reputation: 793

Importing an Android phone image to an emulator

Is there a way to take an image of an android system running on phone and run it on emulator?

I have a client with a certain bug on his phone and I want to be able to take a snapshot or an image of the Android and run it on the emulator to debug it freely without the need to take the phone from the client cause the problem seems to happen only on his phone.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1058

Answers (2)

Scott Barta
Scott Barta

Reputation: 80010

You can't do what you want for a couple reasons. For one, getting the ROM image off the phone wouldn't be a trivial matter. In fact, I can't really think of a way to do it at all. Unless this is a Nexus phone or something where the manufacturer has made the images available for download, manufacturers generally don't want you mucking about with system images.

The more important reason is that the software running on a phone expects to be conntected to the physical hardware of the phone: the processor and chipset, the GPU, all the input and output devices, sensors, and so forth. The ROM image has device drivers that talk to all of that. For that image to work in an emulator, the emulator would have to emulate all of those devices well enough to fool the device drivers, which is a very complex thing, and that environment doesn't exist anywhere -- even manufacturers don't emulate their hardware to that extent when developing it. Much of that hardware and device driver environment is manufacturer-proprietary, so it would be impossible (or legally difficult) for someone other than the manufacturer to make that possible.

The Android emulator has a specific kernel image with device drivers tuned to its software emulation environment; what it's got is designed specifically for that environment. The other side of the equation is also true: you couldn't take an emulator system image and get it running on a physical device.

Upvotes: 3

Dara
Dara

Reputation: 107

In your case, I would suggest you to upload your apk file to testfairy, then you can have the option to trace user's activity with your app, and it also have an error log that might even more useful.

Upvotes: 2

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