Ever since updating to the latest ADT (version 18), I’ve noticed that there seems to be some sort of odd lag between what’s happening on device emulators and what various tools are seeing. For instance, if I set a breakpoint in Eclipse and then attach the debugger to a running app, the debugger will miss the first time that the breakpoint is reached, breaking only on subsequent executions. Similarly, if I try to take a screen snapshot with the Devices view, the image is always from one or two screen changes back. Similar behavior happens if I run hierarchyviewer outside of Eclipse, so I don’t think it’s an Eclipse problem specifically.
I should mention that the part of the app that I’ve tested this with has static screens that change only on user input (that is, no animations or background threads); so it’s not just a communication lag. I can change screens, wait five minutes, take a screen snapshot, and still get an image of what had previously been on the screen. Screen snapshots in perticular never seem to catch up. (Repeating the snapshot still generates the previous screen, not the one on display.)
Has anyone else seen this behavior? Does anyone know how to fix it?
UPDATE: This is on a Windows 7 machine running Java 1.6.0_26 and Eclipse 3.7 (Indigo).
The Google/Android team have been enhancing the emulator images with the ADT updates like GPU support and sensor injection. If you are using old emulator builds (AVDs) from when you first created your work environment (say months ago) you will want to recreate them fresh from the new tools and see if the problem resolves.