Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/improved-android-emulation-genymotion/
If you have been developing Android apps for some time and have ever used the default emulator, then you know how frustratingly slow it can be. Even on a powerful machine, it is manageable at best. The emulator is not only slow in booting up, but on all subsequent runs of your app. A solution to this was AndroVM which provided an Android VM client for VirtualBox. This resulted in an emulator that was noticeably faster than the default Android emulator.
AndroVM was bought by Genymobile and they released Genymotion which is a commercial product that improves on AndroVM.
The Genymotion emulator uses x86 architecture virtualization and OpenGL hardware acceleration which makes running your apps more efficient. It works by creating a virtual machine through VirtualBox to deliver an Android emulator with support for hardware sensors such as GPS, accelerometer and battery. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. You can get it for free and it has a premium license which adds more features to the emulator. For a list of these, take a look at this list. For general testing, the free version is sufficient. For this overview we had a time limited code for the full version.