Android Development Machine

Question

Hello Android community,

With the latest SDK release, and the ability to download separate platforms releases into the SDK, the hardware resources required to develop for Android have increased significantly. Assuming that the developer targets all currently available seven platforms - that could take your dev machine to its knees. Taken alone the 'Android SDK Content Loader' takes nearly two minutes on a dual-core machine with 2GB memory.

As the title suggest the reason for creating this wiki is for everyone to list their development hardware configurations, and thus determine what is a well-suited machine for Android development.

The secondary reason for the wiki is that I'm trying to get my employer to provide me with a decent machine for development as I'm currently forced to work on a nearly 4 year old randomly-built machine, and expected to deliver great results. However, the reality is that my system keeps running out of memory, and I can hardly get a chance to write a few lines of code in between the numerous crashes.

Hope this grows well enough so it helps out beginners to decide whether or not an upgrade on their existing configurations will improve their productivity! Of course, I hope it will serve me as a good evidence to show to my employer that I do need an upgrade too!

Thanks!

Answer 1

I am using the following.

Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit, AMD Phenom 9950 Agena 2.6GHz Quad Core, AMD Radeon HD 4850 512 MB 4 GB Ram, 10,000 RPM HDD Dual 21' LCD monitors

The system is about 1.5 years old, but is still working great.

Answer 2

So, my setup goes like this:

MacBook Mac OS 10.6, 2.4 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, NVidia 9400

I was working working on this machine before iMac, 2.2 GHz, 4GB RAM, I forget which ATI card

Answer 3

I'm using Ubuntu Linux OS, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.40GHz CPU, 2GB memory, 15KRPM hard drive, 37" 1080P LCD TV monitor.

No complaints re Android development with Eclipse. System does become barely functional due to excessive swapping if I try to use a VirtualBox VM with Windows XP loaded (to test web pages in MSIE, etc.) and lots of memory allocated while things like Eclipse are also gobbling memory, though. Eclipse's default memory use settings have been cranked up as well, however.

Answer 4

when testing android apps, my [email protected] is similar speed to my htc hero, but my NexusOne kick's it's butt

Answer 5

I have a MacBookPro 4GB RAM, 2.53 Ghz, 320GB 7,200 RPM hard drive.

Works like a charm, though Eclipse does take a lot of RAM (about 400-600MB), so I try not to use a lot of other CPU/RAM intensive apps at the time (music/media, VM, etc).

Answer 6

Black MacBook (Jan. 2008) 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, 160 GB HD, with the built-in Intel graphics chipset. I've got a 23" Samsung LCD that I hook it up to when I'm working at my desk.

Only thing upgraded is the RAM. Eclipse had a tendency to freeze up all the time until I upgraded the RAM.