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With regards to the speed, that's because the Android emulator is an emulator - it's converting ARM instructions to x86. Because of this, the Android emulator is actually a better representation of how apps run on real hardware than the iOS simulator.

There are x86 images available for the Android emulator, which will run as fast as your host machine will allow.

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Does real hardware convert x86 to ARM ?

No. So remind me again what your point is ?

What? I can't tell if you're trolling, but I'll answer anyway...

The Android emulator allows you to run applications that were compiled for ARM because it translates the ARM instructions to x86. This is really CPU intensive and can eat a lot of memory as well.

Technologies like Intel HAXM[0] speed this up, which is how the x86 Android images manage to be so much faster than the regular ARM images.

[0]: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-hardware-acce...

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