Nox App Player

We are investigating Nox App Player as an alternative to ARC Welder for PC-based testing of apps built with App Inventor. Nox is an Android 4.4.2 emulator, allowing Android apps to be run on a PC.

The installer is just over 250MB and can be downloaded from http://en.bignox.com/. Installation requires Administrator privileges, and an email address is requested though appears not to be used. Installation and startup is a little slow. Nox recommends that virtualisation (VT-x) is enabled in the computer BIOS to improve performance, but this is not required and the emulator performs well without it.

To test an app with Nox, build and save the APK file in App Inventor as usual. The APK file can be dragged and dropped onto the Nox emulator, or there is a Load APK button in the vertical control panel to the right of the emulator. Once installed, apps are retained in the emulator until manually deleted. Switching between landscape and portrait orientation requires Nox to be restarted.