Configuring the Android emulator
Visual Studio will use the Android emulators provided by Google. If we would like the emulator to be fast, then we need to ensure that it is hardware-accelerated. To hardware-accelerate the Android emulator, we need to install the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM), which can be downloaded from https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-hardware-accelerated-execution-manager-intel-haxm.
The next step is to create an Android Emulator. First, we need to ensure that the Android emulator and the Android OS images are installed. To do this, go through the following steps:
- Go to the Tools tab to install the Android Emulator:
- We also need to install one or multiple images to use with the emulator. We can install multiple images if, for example, we want to run our application on different versions of Android. We will select emulators with Google Play (as shown in the following screenshot) so that we can use Google Play services in our app, even when we are running it in an emulator. This is required if, for example, we want to use Google Maps in our app:
- Then, to create and configure an emulator, go to the Android Device Manager from the Tools tab in Visual Studio. From the Android Device Manager, we can start an emulator if we have already created one, or we can create new emulators, as shown in the following screenshot:
- If we click the New Device button, we can create a new emulator with the specifications that we need. The easiest way to create a new emulator here is to select a base device that matches our needs. These base devices will be preconfigured, and that is often enough. However, it is also possible to edit the properties of the device so that we can get an emulator that matches our specific needs.
Because we will not run the emulator on a device with an ARM processor, we have to select either an x86 processor or an x64 processor, as shown in the following screenshot. If we try to use an ARM processor, the emulator will be very slow:
