Making sure the final bits are installed: Now click OK and you'll be presented with another window with the heading Result of creating AVD, click OK on that too as this window is just informational. If you want to speed up rendering, make sure that the Use Host GPU checkbox is checked. Note: When Use Host GPU is checked, you cannot also have Snapshot checked. You'll now need to choose the Intel CPU from the CPU/ABI dropdown, just click it and choose Intel Atom (x86), now you'll need to change the VM Heap to 256 and give your device more ram if required. So if you wanted to change the name, now is the time to do it, just update the text within the AVD Name field.

You should now have been presented with a new window that looks like this: button, this will allow you to change the device name and configuration. Now you'll need to click one of the devices in the list and then click the Edit. Note: You may notice that none of my virtual devices names contain spaces, this is because there was a known issue with the virtual names containing spaces and Xamarins ability to use them to debug so this might be worth a thought if you run into this issue. This will open up the Android Virtual Device Manager and within it, you should have a list of virtual devices that Xamarin can use to debug Android apps within, we're going to want to change one of these to an Intel Atom CPU, as you can see below, I've already changed one of mine so you can see the difference within the AVD. To solve the issues, you'll need to change your virtual device from an ARM CPU to an Intel Atom, to do this, click the icon in the toolbar that looks like a phone with a play button over it, like so: Solving the slow AVD and buggy integration between Xamarin and AVD:

or it just takes AGES to start debugging, chances are you're running your emulator with a virtual ARM CPU, yup. So you're using Xamarin to build an app and all of a sudden, one day, out of the blue, like Xamarin just decided to hate you, it get's stuck on Starting emulator. Its speed and how buggy the debugging can be.

This article attempts to cover a two of the most prominent issues when using an Android emulator with Xamarin. Android emulators can be a bit slow and when I say slow, I mean REALLY slow.

Android emulator mac slow