What are Genymotion Desktop requirements?
Last updated: 3 months ago
- Genymotion Desktop is not available for arm64 Single Board Computers, such as Raspberry Pi.
- Genymotion Desktop is not available for 32-bit systems.
Pre-requisite
- Genymotion account: an active Genymotion account is mandatory to use Genymotion Desktop. You can either launch Genymotion Desktop and click CREATE when prompted to create an account, or go here.
- Internet connection: an Internet connection is mandatory to use Genymotion Desktop.
Note A 15 days token is generated after signing in, so it is possible to use Genymotion Desktop offline during 15 days between each connections. After this time, though, you will have to connect to the Internet so that Genymotion can verify your credentials.
Virtualization technology (PC)
Virtualization Technology (VT/AMD-V/SMV) is mandatory and must be enabled in the BIOS/UEFI. For more details, see How to fix the error "Your CPU is incompatible with virtualization technologies"?
Windows
Supported Windows versions and editions
Genymotion Desktop has been designed for and tested on the following Windows versions:
- Windows 10 Home/Pro (recommended)/Enterprise
- Windows 11 Home/Pro (recommended)/Enterprise
Unsupported Windows systems
- Windows 32-bit
- Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1
- Windows for IoT
- Windows arm64 (coming soon)
- Windows server
- Virtual or Cloud Environments
Recommended hardware
| CPU | Intel Core i5 (64-bit), AMD Ryzen or higher |
| GPU | NVIDIA Geforce 8 series or higher, AMD Radeon R600 or higher* |
| RAM | 16 GB or higher |
| Screen resolution | 1920x1080 or higher |
| Free HD Space | 120MB for Genymotion + 1GB per virtual devices |
*Intel HD/UHD display driver for Windows may not work well with Genymotion Desktop on Windows systems. We recommend using an NVIDIA or AMD GPU on Windows for best compatibility.
VirtualBox + Hyper-V
Genymotion Desktop does not work well with VirtualBox if Hyper-V is enabled, and you may encounter errors or very poor performance. It is currently recommended to disable Hyper-V completely when using Genymotion Desktop. For more details and instructions, please refer to Genymotion Desktop and Hyper-V (Windows).
Laptops
Some laptops have a dual graphics processor (Intel iGPU + NVIDIA/AMD discrete GPU). This type of configuration is known to cause issues (bad performance, errors). To solve this, you need to force Windows to use the high profile NVIDIA/AMD GPU globally.
Make sure that your laptop is plugged to the mains and performance settings are set to "Balanced", "Performance" or "Game mode".
Hypervisor
It is possible to choose between VirtualBox or QEMU (experimental). On Windows, the recommended and default Hypervisor is VirtualBox.
VirtualBox (recommended)
VirtualBox is the default and recommended hypervisor on Windows and it needs to be installed alongside Genymotion Desktop. Fortunately, we offer an installer with Genymotion and the recommended version of VirtualBox on our website. However, if you already have VirtualBox, or if you wish to install it separately, you can refer to the following article: VirtualBox recommended versions.
QEMU (not recommended yet)
Though it is possible to use QEMU hypervisor, it is still experimental and there are known performance issues on Windows systems. Therefore it is not recommended for the moment. Also, please note that QEMU on Windows requires Hyper-V.
Linux
Supported Linux distributions
Genymotion Desktop has been fully tested on the following distributions:
- Ubuntu LTS (64-bit)
- Fedora Workstation (64-bit)
- Debian stable (64-bit)
Other distributions, such as Kali Linux or Arch Linux, are not officially supported.
Incompatible systems
- Linux 32-bit
- Linux arm/arm64 (coming soon)
- Linux Virtual Machines
- Linux servers
Recommended hardware
| CPU | Intel Core i5 (64-bit), AMD Ryzen or higher |
| GPU | OpenGL 3.3 capable graphics processor or higher* |
| RAM | 16 GB or higher |
| Screen resolution | 1920x1080 or higher |
| Free HD Space | 120MB for Genymotion + 1GB per virtual devices |
*If you have an NVIDIA GPU, please use the proprietary drivers for best compatibility.
Hypervisor
It is possible to choose between VirtualBox or QEMU. On Linux, the default Hypervisor is QEMU.
- QEMU (default, recommended)
- QEMU uses kvm which is installed by default with our recommended distributions. There is nothing else to install with this hypervisor.
- VirtualBox (not recommended)
- If you wish to use VirtualBox instead of QEMU, you will need to install it separately and select it explicitly. Please refer to Genymotion Desktop installation guide for Linux for instructions.
- VirtualBox hypervisor is still available for legacy support, but it is deprecated on Linux systems. We strongly suggest switching to QEMU instead if possible.
macOS
Supported macOS versions
Genymotion Desktop has been fully tested on:
- macOS Sonoma (14)
- macOS Sequoia (15)
- macOS Virtual Machines are not supported.
Hypervisor
On macOS, the default Hypervisor is QEMU.
- QEMU (default, recommended)
- QEMU uses Hypervisor which is installed by default on macOS. For more information, please refer to Genymotion Desktop installation guide for macOS.
- VirtualBox (legacy, mac Intel only)
- If you use an old Mac Intel, it is possible to choose between VirtualBox or QEMU.
Important VirtualBox is only available on old mac with Intel x86_64 CPU for legacy support: it is deprecated and we do not recommend using VirtualBox on macOS. However, if you still wish to use it, you can refer to Genymotion Desktop installation guide for macOS for detailed instructions.
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