I’m using the android emulator that comes with the Android SDK, to do some testing of mobile webpages. Here’s a few tips that makes that a better experience.
First off, don’t use any emulator that runs on the ARM(armeabi-v7a) CPU, they are insanely slow. Instead setup an emulator running on the Intel Atom (x86) CPU in you Android Virtual Device Manager.
For best performance on the Intel Atom android emulator you need to install the Intel® Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM).. This is a software driver that enables the emulator to take advantage of Intel processors VT-x hardware-based virtualization, thus it will only work if you have a processor that supports that. If you still don’t get great performance make sure VT-x is enabled in your BIOS.
Another trick to improve graphical performance is to add GPU Emulation to the android emulators list of hardware. To this list it can also be beneficial to add keyboard support, this will make it possible to use your host attached QWERTY keyboard in your emulator.
To access 127.0.0.1 on your host machine from the android emulator you need to use 10.0.2.2, why that is so is described here. Finally if you want to test your webpage in landscape mode instead of portrait your can switch the orientation of the screen on the emulator by pressing ctrl+f11.
Happy emulating 😀