IssueTracker

The iPhone Simulator has a nice UI for this.  You hold down a key combo and you see
two finger spots on the emulator screen, mirrored around the center of the screen.
Drag away from the center to pinch open; drag toward the center to pinch closed.

That is nice, but that only handles the case of "pinch".  It would be a good start,
and would handle probably the majority of common use cases, but there are certainly
very many ways I can move two fingers at once that don't even resemble a pinch.  :)

It is impossible to test multitouch gestures without having a multitouch capable
device... please add at least comment#1 suggestion !

This would be really handy.  I would also like to mention that many people with TUIO devices would love to use them to test.

Pinch is by far the most common multi-touch gesture IMHO. Also, the iPhone simulator also simulates two-fingered scrolling (dragging across the screen with two fingers). I can't think of any other two-fingered gesture that would make sense in a UI :)

Currently the Android version of our app is on hold because it uses multi-touch and we don't have an actual device to test it on.

Rotation is another useful gesture.

Whatever the "common gestures" are, it would be nice to be able to hold down certain keys on the keyboard to perform these gestures in the emulator. E.g. Ctrl for pinch, Alt for Rotate, etc.

In addition, I would like to be able to move additional pointers freely. It could work by holding down number keys, for instance. Holding/pressing "1" would freeze all current pointers and let you control the first pointer with the mouse (up/down/move). Holding/pressing "2" would freeze all current pointers and let you control the second pointer (up/down/move). Etc. This would be useful for apps that use actual multitouch and not just gestures.

Ahhh, come on, guys!  We need the right tools to help Google make its projected $10 billion/year on Android.  Can't you get an intern to do this?  Or a new college hire?

I want to second request the MPX support. Also supporting an standard protocol such as TUIO (tuio.org) will be very handy. That would make porting multi-touch apps to android a breeze.

With TUIO support, we could use the TUIO Simulator for testing Multi-Touch. I used that tool to develop a tabletop Application.

But a solution which is integrated into the android simulator would be much more handy.

MPX input on the emulator is very much needed!  So hopefully this will be added soon!  Without multi-touch apps, Android will never surpass the iPhone.

When we talk about MPX, we're not just talking about two fingers... I hope Android allows mapping of, say, four fingers simultaneously.

I'm thinking of a way to develop an application that you can run on your android phone, connect the phone via usb and have the emulator redirect the input form the phone to the virtual device. This way you can test multi-touch inside the emulator using a real device. I've no idea of the applicability of this solution, and whether there's something like that already implemented, so comments and guidance would be appreciated :)

To #11, that would be a nice idea, but you have to keep in mind there are very different screen sizes and formats and doing letterboxing to, say, map a 16:9 real screen to a 4:3 or 1:1 screen might not be ideal.

Still, it's a nice idea to work around this while the emulator doesn't have direct support, IMHO.

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This feature is especially important since multitouch has been enabled since 2.0.

Even considering how bad Eclipse is, the emulator is the worst part of the SDK. It's slow. Try the iOS Simulator is relatively fast and doesn't take a minute to launch.

To be fair, the Android emulator is a legitimate phone emulator.  Almost _anything_ you can do with a real phone can be successfully tested in the emulator (save for multitouch, obviously, but that's an interface issue, not a software issue).  It really is emulating the ARM processor, which is what makes it slow.  The iPhone simulator does not actually emulate anything.  The "simulator" label is very appropriate, because it only simulates enough of iOS to run a version of your application (not necessarily the final compiled version that will run on the phone), so you can't really say for sure that "works in the simulator, works on the phone" like you can with Android's emulator.  Closer to it's original release, there were even a couple guys who hooked up GPS and an accelerometer to the emulator and used their laptop to test the app they'd developed before we had any physical phones, which is something the iPhone simulator couldn't even dream of.

Not to downplay the need for multitouch, but need to give props to the emulator folks where props are due, because they've done some seriously cool work.

Any official word from Google on this?  Apart from making the SDK faster, this is second on my wish list.  It's more than I nice-to-have.  You can't seriously test anything multitouch-related without an actual device, which is a pretty big drawback.

Also, to clarify another comment above: you can do more than multitouch scale (pinch-to-zoom) in the iOS simulator.  You can also rotate elements.  It's not as natural as it would be on an actual device, but it's passable.  Right now it's completely impossible in the Android emulator, save for actually simulating the events in JavaScript.

Google doesn't comment on (or read) bug reports in this issue tracker.

This issue is in the status "New", which means that no Googler has reviewed the issue. Unfortunately, it's not alone; 80% of the top 100 Defects are "New."

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?q=Type%3ADefect&sort=-stars

And it's even worse when you look at the top 100 enhancements, all of which have more stars than this issue.

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?q=Type%3AEnhancement&sort=-stars

Well, in r17 they've finally added "Multi-Touch" support, as detailed here: http://tools.android.com/tips/hardware-emulation#TOC-Multi-Touch

However, to use this multitouch support requires a phone tethered running their multi-touch simulation software, so it's still limited to folks owning a real phone, in which case you might as well test directly on the phone.

Hi there,

the online documentation is not up to date

see
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=34868

use the instruction you find in the SdkController application itself.

I'd like to see this feature implemented not so much because I don't have a device, but because sometimes I would like to:

1) Test multi-touch with different Android versions,
2) Develop on a remote desktop (hence no possibility to attach a physical device).

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Implemented by CL 185430

Specifically, a pinch/rotate gesture was added in Emulator release 25.0.4 preview 5 - hold Alt to bring up the interface.

Reference issue 36949180 to track the addition of a "two-finger swipe gesture".
Reference issue 36949180 to track the addition of an interface for general multitouch input.