If you have (an extremely)good internet connection, appetize.io beats all emulators. we do over 100 builds a day on appetize.io and the whole team can see the same emulation with near to no startup/installation time for the emulator.

If appetize.io could be run locally or on our servers it would be a delight!

Both Genymotion and Appetize are freemium. :D

https://www.genymotion.com/features/ (local AS plugin, Win/Lin/Mac)

https://appetize.io/docs (hosted, live gui, 100 minutes free per month)

I vote for genymotion. The performance is amazing, and very useful features that are actually easy to use (location mocking, camera mocking, etc.)

The default android emulator always ran kinda slow for me. There are some performance hacks online, but why bother!

The one that ships with Android Studio is pretty rock solid, ensure you're using x86 Android images and you'll have a close-to-native Android experience.

Genymotion is great as well! Only caveat is needing to side load Google Play Apps and Services.

Thanks!