Visual Studio Emulator for Android is a tool that allows Android developers to test and debug their apps from the desktop OS of their choosing.

The Visual Studio Emulator for Android is a tool within the full Visual Studio 2015 suite, which Microsoft brought to Mac users for the first time back in April.

“As part of Visual Studio 2015, developers now get access to the Visual Studio Emulator for Android, a high-performance x86-based emulator for the Android platform that supports a variety of ...

Microsoft developers building software for Android have noticed this, so the company developed its own high-performance Android emulator. That emulator is included with Visual Studio 2015.

This is something outside the control of the Mono team. I wrote a pair of blog posts on how to get around this: Android Emulator - Increasing Performance Suggestions for MonoDroid and The Android ...

As Microsoft evolves its emulator to be more flexible, it becomes a more attractive way for developers to test their apps. The new emulator was released yesterday with CTP6.

Anyone having performance issues with the android emulator (assuming you're not targeting assembly code) try creating a new AVD with the CPU architecture set to x86.

A skunkworks project by Xamarin, the developers of Mono for Android and Mono Touch, machine-translated millions of lines of Java in Android to C#.