Android Emulator setup

The purpose of this section is to guide you to setup an Android Emulator in your development environment. Android emulators are called Android Virtual Devices. The interface to create or edit emulators is called Android AVD Manager.

If you have installed Android Studio, you have an Android Emulator ready to use.

If you have installed Visual Studio 2015 with Xamarin or with Apache Cordova, you also have an Android Emulator ready to use.

To check if an Android Emulator already exists launch the Android AVD Manager: All Apps -> Android SDK Tools -> AVD Manager

If the Android AVD Manager is empty you need to create one emulator.

Before creating a new Android emulator, you need to install the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM). The installation process of HAXM is explained by Intel in this article : Speeding Up the Android* Emulator on Intel® Architecture.

Once you have installed HAXM, you are ready to click the Create button.

Configure the new Android Virtual Device as follows:

Click on the OK button to save the new Android Virtual Device.

The Android AVD Manager should be similar as follows:

To check if the configuration is correct, click on the Start button. You should see a confirmation that the emulator works in fast mode: