There are a number of emulators for compiled Xamarin projects for the target platform and the development environment. Developers have most flexibility with the emulator for the Android platform, whereas the options for iOS and Windows Store Apps are limited to the SDK-provided emulators.
Android applications can be run and tested on a number of emulators on both Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X operating systems.
Android SDK comes with the default emulator that is installed on the development machine. This emulation option is available both on OS X and Windows operating systems.
Figure 9: AVD and Genymotion Emulators
This Android emulator uses the Android Virtual Devices (AVD) to emulate the Linux kernel and the Android runtime. It does not require any additional virtualization software to run, however, the lack of virtualization support makes AVD much less responsive and makes the startup time relatively longer. It also provides a wide range of emulation options for developers, from SMS and telephony to hardware, peripherals, and power events.
The Genymotion emulator (https://www.genymotion.com/) is one of the most popular emulation options for Xamarin and Android developers. Although it is available with a free license, the free version only allows for GPS and camera emulation. The Genymotion emulator runs on (and is installed with) VirtualBox virtualization software.
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VirtualBox together with Hyper-V
Virtual Box software cannot be run alongside Hyper-V virtualization software, which is required for Windows Phone development and emulation on Windows operating systems. In order to use both the Windows Phone emulator and the Genymotion Android emulator, you can create a dual boot option to disable and enable Hyper-V on Windows start-up.
bcdedit /copy {current} /d "No Hyper-V" bcdedit /set {<identifier from previous command>} hypervisorlaunchtype off
This would create a second boot option to start Windows without the Hyper-V feature so that the virtualization can be used by VirtualBox.
The last and the most recent Android emulation option is the Visual Studio Android emulator. This Android emulator runs on Hyper-V and provides various device API versions and emulation options for developers.
Figure 10: Visual Studio Android Emulator
The Visual Studio Android emulator is installed as part of the Visual Studio 2015 installation and can also be installed as an extension later. The emulator provides a similar experience to the Windows Phone emulator and allows developers and testers to use almost the same set of emulation options with different device profiles as well as different API levels.
iOS emulation is only possible with the Xcode tools and iOS SDK. The iOS simulator can be started either directly on Apple OS X while developing with Xamarin Studio, or by pairing the build machine with the Visual Studio Xamarin extension running on Microsoft Windows. It also can be used to test both iPhone and iPad applications.