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If you’re looking for a way to test an Android device, consider the Android-86 port which can be run as a VM. This makes a great test/demo platform for Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager or Microsoft Intune.
Colleague Joe Kuster wrote an article awhile back regarding his experience installing Android as a Hyper-V guest. More recently Luís Rato has full installation guide on the latest version (4.4 R2).
Version 4.4 R2 adds native support for Hyper-V which makes the installation process a breeze. There are still many apps that don’t work even beyond the fact that the VM will not have specific hardware features (Bluetooth, GPS, etc.). As Luis points out, this is largely due to the processor architecture.
It is also interesting that some very basic features don’t work or crash. For example, as Joe notes, attempting to change the desktop background via the setting menu fails; however, I discovered it can be changed via Bing. Just install Bing, browse / search for an image and use the build in feature to set the image as the background. I tried several images and it worked every time.
My VHDX was about 5GB while Android showed it was using about 1.6GB total. I didn’t take time to figure out how to shrink a VHD with an EXT3 partition, but 7-zip compressed it to just over 500MB.
Below are the results of various applications which Joe tested on an earlier [read-more-redirect urltext=”CatapultSystems.com” url=”https://www.catapultsystems.com/blogs/installing-android-as-a-hyper-v-guest”] version and I retested.
| Application | Android 4.4 RC1 | Android 4.4 R2 |
| Microsoft Office 365 | will not install | not tested |
| Google Chrome | crash | crash |
| Google Maps | crash | runs and searches but map is not visible |
| Google Navigation | crash | runs and navigates but map is not visible |
| Mozilla Firefox | crash | crash |
| Yammer | work as expected | work as expected |
| Microsoft Lync 2013 | work as expected | work as expected |
| Microsoft OneDrive | work as expected | work as expected |
| PushBullet | work as expected | work as expected |
| Google YouTube | work as expected | work as expected |
| BitSync (BTSync) | work as expected | work as expected |
| HD Widgets | work as expected | not tested |
References
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