Android developers need Anroid emulators to develop and test applications on their laptops or desktop environments. Slow emulators and fragmentation issue are two problems for these people. In this way, Xamarin released Xamarin Android Player in 2014.
Thanks to Xamarin, developers can debug their apps for different API levels and get rid of the burden of buying multiple physical devices which would be very costly.
The Xamarin Android Player, which use Virtual Box, make use of hardware accelerated virtualization technology on x86 or x64 platforms. It can be used on both Windows (7 and above) and Mac OS X (10,7 and above). It has support for OpenGL that helps smooth and fast graphics. It has a very short boot time, has an integration with Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio making the development processes of building debugging, deploying etc. even easier.
Following the setup of Xamarin Android Player, you can browse various images of different API levels, choose among them, and run the player from either Xamarin or Visual Studio with debug on device preference. You will find options to build an emulator from pre-defined templates which Xamarin already created for its users.
Xamarin Android Player has also features such as screen orientation, battery condition, volume levels, GPS location, multi-touch, driving simulations, accelerometer, SD card, battery, GPS, camera, audio, keyboard and so on. You can also drag apk files onto the emulator for easy installation. With Xamarin Android Player, you can configure even the rarest Android setups; you can reset, duplicate and delete your emulator in an easy and useful way.
Thanks to Xamarin, you can try and test different scenarios for your application for mobile devices. It also lets you take screenshots of your app while it is on the run.
Xamarin’s trial version is free but unfortunately the project seems to be discontinued for now.
It has a setup file around 90 megabytes. If you are a developer and looking for a faster emulator than the Android SDK emulator you may want to give Xamarin Android Player a chance. It is also faster than the majority of other emulators.
