[withjive]

If your doing Android Development with the ARM emulator, then its crazy slow. However, if you use the x86 emulator - then you get native speed.

Xcode/iOS's emulator is actually x86 - which is why it seems faster than Android's default emulator.

[saagarjha]

Xcode doesn’t emulate anything, it runs the entire iOS userspace as native processes on top of the macOS kernel.

[richardwhiuk]

It "emulates" the hardware - e.g. you can inject shake / GPS / etc

This is the same as the Android x86 "emulator".

[saagarjha]

IIRC the Android uses hardware-assisted virtualization through Intel HAXM. iOS simulator is run entirely in userspace in a seperate launchd context.

(Mostly referring to the actual processor/OS itself; buttons that "vibrate" the phone are not really technically interesting to me.)

[kristianp]

The annoying part about the default x86 emulator that installs from Android Studio is that it's incompatible with hyper-v. Requiring a reboot to disable.