Genymotion a superior alternative to Google's Android emulators

[Update 2017-08-29] Visual Studio Emulator for Android has been discontinued.  VirtualBox can cause problems with Hyper-V running, so Genymotion is not a viable choice.  Using a cheap Android device for most debugging.   If one needs an Android emulator on an Intel CPU based PC running Hyper-V, which disables intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM) that allows running fast x86 Android images from Google, one can run a very slow ARM Android image from Google for any chosen Android OS occasionally. 

[Updated 2015-08-03] Visual Studio Emulator for Android is currently the best Android emulator on the planet.  It works with Android Studio.

Original:

Android emulators have a slew of performance and stability issues.  Genymotion is a relieving alternative.

They are fast, much faster than Google's Android emulators, and as fast as or even faster than Intel's Android images that utilizes Intel's Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM).  HAXM excludes Microsoft's Hyper-V which is required by Windows Phone emulators.  In other words, one cannot use Intel Android images and Windows Phone emulators simultaneously.  This could be a problem for develoeprs who has an app with versions for both Android and Windows Phone.  Genymotion  solves this problem.

To access an app's data in DDMS of Eclipse, one needs to do the following in command:

To copy an app's folders from one emulator to another emulator, one has to do the following because Eclipse's DDMS does not allow pushing folders or multiple files  to device from a computer though allows pulling folders from a device to a computer:

    adb root push com.my.foo /data/data/com.my.foo/

If adb is already rooted, then the command is:

    adb push com.my.foo /data/data/com.my.foo/

It is important to issue the command from the folder of com.my.foo to avoid possible issues related to adb push command not being able to handle certain directory names (e.g. names with spaces).

One may get the  error "Unable to find ADB in this path" this is caused by that you probably have followed the common sense to use the folder that has adb.exe.  Genymotion requires the path of the Android SDK root.

To use Google Play service which is required for testing in-app billing, Emulators with Google Apps should be used. There are only two as of today (2014-03-09)

Genymotion Emuators cannot handle H.264 video and it crashes apps trying to decode H.264.

Genymotion relies on Oracle VirtualBox which is a a great virtualization tool.  Use VirtualBox 4.3 and abvoe because older verions may make Windows 8 unable to reboot, and the problem may be so bad that a booting disk image may be needed to revive the machine. This could be a common problem with VirtualBox.  Virtual Box 4.3.8 should be avoided because of a bug.

The following is what happens when VirtualBox older than V4.3 is installed on Windows 8:

1. Install VirtualBox
2. Reboot, Windows 8 gets stuck at the startup screen
3. Hard reset, Windows 8 gets stuck at the startup screen again.\
4. Hard reset again, Windows 8 enters repair mode.
5. Select restore
6. Windows 8 restarts normally