If you only need Maps, look at this Stackoverflow question. The emulators do not include Google API’s.The Gingerbread (API 10) x86 system image does not support GPU emulation.Otherwise you won’t be able to type into it from your machine’s keyboard. If you decide to use the emulator for development you will probably want to enable ‘Hardware keyboard present’, too.

I can even play angry birds at 60 fps on my 2-year old bottom-line Macbook Pro. Your emulated device is now able to run native on your machine, and really fast.

Lastly, since the graphics are still being emulated on the CPU, you will want to check the ‘use Host GPU’ checkbox in the virtual device editor.

If you run your emulated device now you’ll find that it is, in fact, much much faster.

Mount/install that package and that will install the actual accelerator.

Hover the mouse over it and you’ll see it’s location (On my machine it’s /Users/Mohannad/android-sdk-macosx/extras/intel/Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager).

Now here’s the tricky part, the HAXM installation will say it’s “Installed”, but IT IS NOT.

Then scroll to the very bottom and in the Extras package you’ll find an item called Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM), download that too.

Go into your Android SDK manager and download the relevant Intel x86 Atom system images.

I spent a bit of time working on this and figured out a useful workflow!

Fortunately, Google announced that the emulator can now run native on the machine, therefore performing much faster. Programmers are likely to have finished development and submitted the app to the Play Store before the emulator is done booting up. Many of you know how slow the emulator is.

Mac android studio emulator slow