For a long time, Android Virtual Devices (AVDs) had the reputation of being buggy and horrendously slow. The introduction of hardware acceleration has made a big difference, but a powerful computer is still advised, especially if you want to run more than one at a time, which is very often the case.
The biggest change to Android emulation is not hardware acceleration, but rather the appearance of alternative emulators. As we shall see shortly, some of these offer distinct advantages over the native emulator, but AVDs should not be written off. Despite the drawbacks, Android emulators are the only emulators that run on all Android versions, including the most recent, developer-only, versions. Not only this, but Android emulators are the most customizable and any possible hardware or software configuration can be recreated with a little effort.
Early on in the development...
