Why Is the Android Emulator So Slow? How to Speed Up the Android Emulator

Why Android Studio emulator is extremely slow?

My Nexus 5X API 24 and 25 Emulators works well but Nexus 5X API 26 and above are very slow, I check memory and CPU costs in Android Profiler it shows much higher than others, even simulators have the same density.

I think currently we often choose latest Emulators (from API 26 - Android 8.0 and above) ONLY for testing code that relates to OS features changes, for stable and performance testing, we should choose Emulators equal or below API 25 - Android 7.1.

I reported this problem to Google, hope they will make some enhancements soon.

React Native. Why android emulator is so slow?

Another tip - there is an option to run without debugging etc for performance testing:

Open the menu by 'shaking' the device (cmd+m on Mac, ctrl+m on Windows) and open settings. Then set JS Dev Mode to false and you'll see the app operate at much closer performance to what it would on a real device. The only downside is you don't get your debug logs, but useful to see how the app is likely to behave on real devices.

UPDATE
If you still want to see console logs and other debug information, you can access these in Logcat inside Android Studio without sacrificing performance.

UPDATE 2
I have switched the an M1 Mac which runs on ARM architecture and the emulator is incredibly fast now. If you're going to be doing a lot of React Native development on a Mac I'd recommend getting an M1 Mac!

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