Android-x86 and VirtualBox - A Potent Combination

For a "network guy", mobile devices can be really frustrating for one simple reason - unless you jailbreak the device, it can be rather difficult (if not impossible) to dive under the hood and get an idea of how the devices behave at the network layer.  Unless you just happen to have a spare device or two laying around and are willing to jailbreak them, you might be wondering if there's any way to observe network behavior in a fairly straightforward fashion. When it comes to Android, however, there IS a solution.

Now, it's certainly true that you can install the Android SDK and use its included emulator to run various versions of the OS, but that's a LOT of overhead; I don't need to dive THAT deeply into Android internals, and--to be honest--the performance of the emulator isn't all that great. I recently discovered the Android-x86 project, which has been going strong since 2009 to bring Android to the x86 platform. I installed Android-x86 on an old netbook and started playing with it, and then I realized...why not run it in a VM?

Enter Oracle VirtualBox.

This free virtualization package is available for Windows, OS X, Linux and Solaris; I'm currently using it on my Windows 7 laptop and several of my Ubuntu Linux machines, so I tossed an Android-x86 ISO into a new VM and went to work. Ten minutes later, I had this:

Android-x86 5.1RC1 running under VirtualBox on Windows 7

Now, it isn't perfect; since my laptop isn't a touchscreen, I can't work with gestures or multitouch, and (obviously) telephony functions aren't available. However, one can certainly exercise basic functions of just about any Android app within Android-x86...and, thanks to VirtualBox's extensive network support, it's a trivial matter to capture the network traffic of your Android VM with Wireshark. In no time at all, I was profiling the network usage/performance of various Android apps.

If you need to work with several versions of Android, Android-x86 can help you there as well; you can download ISOs of Lollipop, KitKat, Jellybean and Ice Cream Sandwich and install them to their own VMs. You can also share/copy VirtualBox VMs across multiple platforms (for example, I moved an Android-x86 VM from one of my Linux systems to my Windows 7 system with no problems). While I haven't done it myself, I'm told that some enterprise admins have registered their Android-x86 VM with their mobile device management (MDM) products of choice for use in testing/prototyping...

(NOTE: You can install Android-x86 to a bootable USB stick, if you so desire; here are the details.)

(NOTE #2: If you have a touchscreen laptop sitting around, give it a shot! Here's a video of Android-x86 4.4.2 (KitKat) running on a Lenovo Y50.)

So, whether you're testing, developing, or just want to play around with Android without buying a device or jailbreaking your personal stuff, take a look at Android-x86 and VirtualBox; they make a good pair.