Android emulator, how can I control 2 applications simultaneously?

Is there any way of running 2 (or potentially more) applications on the emulator at the same time?

I have an application that obtains its data from another application, therefore I want to modify data in application A and then see how application B handles it.

I'm intending to have some kind of "slider" on application A, therefore I need them both to be runni开发者_C百科ng at the same time to see the "slider" on application B update.

You can't have UI threads of two applications running at the same time, but if one of your apps has a background service, that can be running while the UI thread of the other is active. This service could put a notification in the status bar to signify that the data has been updated (actually, I think it's now required that a background service have something in the status bar anyway).

I believe you can also create a "toast" pop-up notification from a background service.

If it's just for testing, your background service can also write messages to the logs which you can see with logcat.

You can use the emulator like a normal phone, so you can run as many apps at the same time as you want. When you say "running", are you talking about "debugging"? You can install any number of apps using adb install, or by just running it through Eclipse. Running a new app won't stop the previous one (besides, you can always go to the app menu and start your other app).