I have spent so much time fiddling around with android emulators and I could not believe it. I thought something along the lines of “hm, interesting” and then tried it out. And, the last sentence mentions that the Xamarin Android Player (XAP) is therefore officially deprecated!!!

In the section “New Mac OS X Universal Installer”, a sidenote mentions that there is a new (and improved) Android Emulator from Google and that there is an improved Hyper-V based Android Emulator for VS2015.

The emulator started but the app could not be deployedīut then, I stumbled upon the “Live from dotNetConf: Cycle 7, Xamarin Studio 6, and more” blog post by Miguel de Icaza, written on June 8, 2016:.

I ended up with a recurring list of problems: I tried many and could not get any to run within a reasonable time frame. There are various options, such as the Android Emulator from the Android SDK in combination with HAXM (Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager), the Xamarin Android Player (XAP) and others. I tried using various emulators to run my Xamarin.Droid project.

While deploying and debugging code on a real device worked, I always had issues with emulators. One of the biggest pain-points was the use of emulators.

From the first day that I have been using Xamarin for cross-platform development, it was a struggle.

Android emulator mac for visual studio