'Weird Android Emulator and Mac tap-to-click sensitivity issue

I'm experiencing a really weird and frustrating issue with the Android Emulator on macOS Monterey.

I have "tap to click" enabled on my Macbook Pro (Mid 2015 15"), and it works fine in all other apps. But somehow, when the emulator window is active it seems to miss almost every other tap. If I click hard instead of tapping, it catches every click. The tap sensitivity in the Trackpad settings is set to "light".

So, it seems that the emulator window is somehow less sensitive to tapping than all other apps. I don't even know how this is possible, is there even such a thing as app-specific tap-sensitivity??

What's more, it's not only the emulator window itself that has this issue, but the emulator settings window as well. If I tap the "Enable clipboard sharing" toggle, it misses about 50% of the taps. If I click hard, it catches them 100%. If I try the same in some other app (tested with the "System Preferences" window), it catches 100% of the taps.

I have tested and tested this again to make sure I'm not biasing the results, but there really is a difference, and it's driving me nuts. I think it appeared after updating to Monterey, but not 100% sure of the exact timing correlation.

Any ideas??

macosandroid-emulatormacos-monterey


Solution 1:[1]

I've noticed the same issue some time ago. Unfortunately, I didn't find any solutions.

However, there are a couple of good enough workarounds:

  1. Launch the emulator in a tool window. Anyway, this is a default approach for modern versions of Android Studio. To enable/disable it check Preferences -> Tools -> Emulator -> Launch in a tool window.
  2. Use alt emulators. For instance, Genymotion doesn't have such an issue.

Solution 2:[2]

I am new to the Android Emulator, but am experiencing the same issue in Ubuntu, even though I have tap-to-click disabled in the OS. I hate tap-to-click, so having an ultra-sensitive-to-touch Android screen emulated on my laptop is beyond frustrating.

Looking at the documentation, I came across the SOURCE_CLASS_POINTER method, which states:

The input source is a pointing device associated with a display. Examples: SOURCE_TOUCHSCREEN, SOURCE_MOUSE. A MotionEvent should be interpreted as absolute coordinates in display units according to the View hierarchy. Pointer down/up indicated when the finger touches the display or when the selection button is pressed/released. Use getMotionRange(int) to query the range of the pointing device. Some devices permit touches outside the display area so the effective range may be somewhat smaller or larger than the actual display size.

In reading that, I've come to believe this may actually be the default behavior due to touchpad events being interpreted through the SOURCE_TOUCHSCREEN method, rather than SOURCE_TOUCHPAD or SOURCE_MOUSE.

Unfortunately, I don't have a solution as much as a workaround:

I plugged in a mouse and tested the pointer up/down movements over the screen, which this part of the document suggests should register as a press. However, with the mouse it only responds to clicks. So it suggests to me that it is indeed properly interpreted as a SOURCE_MOUSE controlled pointer and not a SOURCE_TOUCHSCREEN controlled pointer.

So unless we can find out how to make the AVD properly interpret a touchpad as a touchpad, and not a touchscreen, using a mouse seems like the best solution.

For reference, I'm including this link to the AVD manual: https://developer.android.com/studio/run/emulator

UPDATE: Somehow over the period of about 18 hours and several restarts, my AVD no longer does tap-to-click on its virtual screen. It would be very hard to pinpoint exactly what changed because I've been updating packages frequently since I'm running a pre-alpha release of Ubuntu, but I think it's from using X11 instead of Wayland.

Which got me thinking, you could try changing your display server from Cocoa to X11. Thankfully, MacPorts, the MacOS version of the FreeBSD Ports Tree, makes it fairly easy to cross-compile software. It contains build recipes for multi-platform unix-like software, much like HomeBrew but often allowing for more customization.

That tap issue was annoying enough it's probably worth giving a shot.

(from macports website) The X11 windowing environment, for ports that depend on the functionality it provides to run. You have multiple choices for an X11 server: https://www.macports.org/install.php

I would build them in this order:

MacPorts: X11 - If you build it, you'll have a bunch of libraries already

MacPorts: QEMU - use make configure menu to select GTK3+, if there's no option for X11, try this build flag with make after you install X11 (pointing it at your X11's lib dir):

make -L/opt/X11/lib -lX11

Lastly, MacPorts: Android Platform tools

Related StackOverflow Q/As:

Compiling a C program that uses OpenGl in Mac OS X

Running x11 on Mac OS

Solution 3:[3]

My problem was really similar, I am using MAC with apple mouse, so I could fix it by disabling the mouse wheel on Android Emulator Extended Controls.

Android Emulator Settings

Hope that help

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

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Solution 1 comrade
Solution 2
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