Debug Delphi Firemonkey Android Apps On Windows And OSX With BlueStacks

Luis B. wrote in with the tip that there is another way to run your Android apps built with Delphi XE5 or XE6 Firemonkey on Windows besides the Android emulator which is notoriously slow. The BlueStacks App Player is basically a virtual machine that runs Android apps on Windows and Mac OSX. It runs near full speed and they havd 10 engineers work on it for two years to achieve the speed that it has. You can play all of the Android games out there full speed on BlueStacks. You can install your APK files into the App Player by double clicking on them once you have BlueStacks App Player installed but the install process itself can be slow. A faster way is that you can launch the apps from within BlueStacks by just double clicking on the APK file in a directory on your Windows/Mac machine. The ability for BlueStacks to run on the Mac is new functionality which has been released recently. In any event testing on real Android devices is always the preferred method, the BlueStacks App Player is second to that, and finally if both of those options are not possible you can use the Android emulator itself. Finally, if you want to be able to use the Android console log (very similar to the IOS console log) Olaf Monien has a blog post where he shows how to print out to the Android console log:
uses
AndroidApi.Log;

begin
LOGI(TMarshaller.AsAnsi(‘Hello World’).ToPointer);
Lastly Olaf links to an Android LogViewer application which will show you the output of the Android log. If you have Eclipse you can also use Eclipse to view the log.

Head over and download the free BlueStacks App Player, debug, and test out your Android apps on Windows and Mac.