Speeding up the Android emulator

The default Android emulator that comes with the Android development toolkit is quite sluggish. It is often disappointing and painful to test an application in the Android device emulators. The wiser choice for developers is to have a real Android device to test on. However, because the Android ecosystem has various form factors and device manufactures, it is practically impossible to buy each targeted device to test the app. You have to go for some cost effective solution to test your app on all targeted devices.

The following section will guide you through some of the tips to make your Android emulator faster and other alternative options available to test Android apps.

Using the x86 emulator

Android provides an x86 emulator that can speed up the development considerably due to faster start and execution times for the AVD. The x86 emulator is not a part of the base Xamarin installation, but the directions for the installation can be found on the Xamarin website...