Recording screencasts is a big win. It was previously too slow using emulators or screen cappers. There are a few Android apps that do it directly on the device, but you have to root it to run them!
Also, it's great for co-workers who don't have an Android device. e.g. we're porting to iOS app right now, and the iOS developer can see Android features without having an Android device.
But can you use any screen capture software for the emulators?
The downside of using Genymotion is that it's so fast it will hide a lot of performance issues that you will see when running on an actual device. So please, test early and often on actual hardware with extreme amounts of data.
For performance testing I recommend using a Galaxy Ace (actually using - install some apps, fill it up with data) and testing your app on it. If it's fast on that it'll be fast on just about anything!
Looking over the changelog from Android 2.2-4.3, there's no mention of performance tweaks to Dalvik. They even have the father of JIT, Lars Bak, working for them. But he's focused on the V8 JS engine and doesn't provide any assistance with Android.[3]
[1] http://androidandme.com/2010/02/news/myriad-dalvik-turbo-boo...
[2] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2388956
[3] http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califor...
He's also one of the leads on the Dart VM [1], but that likely just leaves even less time for involvement in anything Java/Android.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-M-dRek8oKjCT0pq7fFlC7DfFGW...
Could this be a non-Linux phenomenon?
I think I'll benchmark it in the near future!
Doing exactly this to build a simulator would seem an obvious step. No virtualisation necessary, good performance, and good enough for the majority of use cases.
Someone spent time and effort implementing this, thinking it must be a good idea. Why?
