Yep and it sucked much more than WP ever did, only after everyone started ignoring it while making use of Genymotion or Microsoft's own implementation, did Google care to actually improve it.

So bad emulator support wasn't an issue regarding Android's adoption.

But it may have some affect on app development. Even today most apps are iOS first.

Using the iOS simulator compared to the Android emulator is like night and day.

When you run your app on the iOS simulator, your app is compiled to x86 code and linked against an x86 build of the iOS frameworks - no emulation involved. The code —> build -> test cycle is so much faster with iOS.

With classic Windows Mobile with the .Net compact framework, you could do a lot of your testing just running your app on your desktop without ever using the emulator.

In US and other iOS centric countries yes, but good luck getting users across the globe on regions where Android rules like Europe, Africa, South America and Asia.

Also getting Mac hardware in some of those regions is quite expensive endeavor versus the average salary, if there are any stores at all selling them.

Android emulator runs native Intel code, just like iOS emulator, since 2013. That's what the HAXM thing is about. Anyone who didn't notice that during the last 5 years or so, probably doesn't do much Android development anyway.

Also, I will here agree with pjmlp, having real device for development and testing with that real device will beat any emulator, native or not.

Yes it does but an emulator is good for negative testing - if it doesn’t work on the emulator it probably won’t work on the device and if it does. You should still be worried. It’s not great for positive testing.

iOS still shines fit on device testing - you can conceivable have a representative sample of all iOS devices that your app should run on. I would probably want to have an SE, a 7s, and 8 plus and a X on the iPhone side and be okay with just one 9.7 inch iPad.

Both working device and emulator are equally important. People usually divide in two camps depending on their role in the project: device lovers and emulator lovers.

Solo developers, product leads and testers tend to choose the real device as their first destination. Linear coders and logic writers usually choose emulator.

Add a device variety testing. It's very hard to do right without emulator. Having all those device variations in physical form may be expensive and consume a lot of space.

Anecdote:

My first job as a mobile developer was writing Windows Mobile apps for ruggedized devices. We had to test our apps outside with gloves on to make sure that the interface was usable by the field techs in the middle of the winter even if they lost their stylus.