Every developer who writes Android application has used the emulators provided by Android SDK to test and/or debug the code under development. I bet that there's no one out there who hasn't been frustrated about the time the emulator needs to load, deploy the application, and run it. Things are getting even worse when you want to test large applications with time-consuming activities, in a limited-resources environment.

The answer to these problems is called GenyMotion (https://www.genymotion.com/) and it comes in two flavors: free and commercial. We will focus on the free features that are enough to leave behind forever the old-fashioned Android SDK emulators. So what is actually GenyMotion? Why is it so fast and what are the advantages of using it over Android emulators?

GenyMotion is actually an Android running on VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/) virtual machine (VM). VirtualBox is a visualization platform for home and enterprise usages that...