Google Releases Android 11 x86 System Images With ARM Compatibility

Google has released snapshots that will make it easier for developers to test their apps with the Android Emulator running on the x86-based computer. Android 11 x86 system images with ARM compatibility can be downloaded from Android Studio.

Google, the name behind the Android operating system, released Android 11 Developer Preview 2 earlier this month.With this release, the firm has made a significant change to enable more efficient debugging in Android Emulator in Android Studio. With this change, Android 11 system images for x86 CPUs now allow applications that are connected to C or C ++ to run more smoothly without full ARM emulation and without using CPU virtualization.

Android applications written in local code (ie C or C ++) should be compiled considering different CPU architectures. At this point, the application that targets different CPU architectures such as ARM, ARM64, x86 or x86-64 should also have different versions.This is because the native code iscompiled directly in machine instructions for a particular architecture, unlike Kotlin or Java applications running on Android Runtime (ART).

The developers needed a physical Android device:

Usersneed a different x86 CPU version to be able to test theirapplications

with the Android Emulator running on the x86-based computer. At this point, the x86 version of the application does not work on smartphones, as it is usually based on ARM or ARM64 CPUs.Until now, the only solution to this problem was touse

a physical Android device or to load emulator images with full ARM emulation for x86 CPUs, but this option also did not work properly.

To solve this situation, Google has released new Android 11 x86 system images with

ARM compatibility. These system images use ABIs that mediate between applications written in different languages ​​or between applications and operating systems.The ARM instructions in the ARM binary code are converted to x86 only, while the rest of the codecontinues to be executed in x86. In this way, the process

requiresless performance and can work even on low level hardware.

New x86 compatible Android 11 system images can be downloaded from

Android Studio using Android Virtual Device Manager or SDK Manager.In the meantime, Googlewill also allow developers to release the ARM version of their app with ABIs instead of the x86 version for Chromebooks.