If you are developing in a virtual machine, all is not lost, you can still debug against a remote emulator to run the emulator on the host machine.

Don’t Run the Emulator in a Virtual Machine – The emulator is a virtual machine, and running a virtual machine in a virtual machine just compounds the problem.

Get a few different devices, and you are set. There are a number of other advantages besides speed, and Android hardware is pretty cheap compared to iOS hardware.

Use Actual Hardware – OK, so this doesn’t speed up the emulator, but it is worth mentioning again.

Using these tips I’ve seen the emulator go from sluggishly terrible to actually usable on a few different systems. Many of these tips can be combined for better performance. Here are some tips to make the ARM Android emulator faster for any Android development tool, but my examples are specific to Delphi XE5. You can configure and create different Android Virtual Devices with the Android Virtual Device Manager or from the adb command-line tool. The Android Emulator runs an Android Virtual Device or AVD. In some parts of the world, Intel Atom based Android devices are becoming more common, so those emulators do serve a purpose. So you are technically testing on a niche hardware configuration that is not likely to be what your app runs on in the real world. Yes, they are faster, but the majority of Android devices (in the USA at least) are ARMv7. These almost always are using an x86/Atom Android image, which runs faster because it doesn’t need to emulate the CPU, running x86 code on your host CPU (much like the iOS Simulator). You may see some articles or tips about using the Intel HAXM, BlueStacks, Genymotion, Android-x86 or some other high performance Android emulator. Most Android developers I talk to develop on actual hardware, but sometimes you need the emulator, and when you are using it you need it to run faster. This means the iOS Simulator is typically faster than actual hardware, and the Android Emulator is slower than actual hardware. The main reason is because it is emulating the ARM CPU & GPU, unlike the iOS Simulator, which runs x86 code instead of the ARM code that runs on the actual hardware.

Mac os x emulator android