In Visual Studio, in the Xamarin project, open the Android SDK Tools. If you know where the SDK Tools are located in the file system, you can also do it like this: you can also enter the “Android SDK Manager” in the shortcut bar in the upper right corner.
Then, make sure you have Intel Hardware Acceleration Manager (HAXM) installed, which will speed up all TREMENDOUSLY actions. The reason this is much faster is because the x86 instruction set is the same as your Intel processor, and also the Intel hardware virtualization acceleration provided by HAXM. ARM device simulators mimic ARM processors that cannot be easily modeled by a PC or Mac x86 processor, so they are terribly slow.
Then, when debugging, make sure that you only use x86 device simulators that you access through the Android Virtual Device Manager, next to the SDK Manager:
Visual Studio has an Android simulator, but I found the latest Android simulator is much better, and it is officially from Google :)
Remember: ALWAYS test your application on REAL DEVICES. Simulation is not enough for the test. Of course, they are great for development!
Hope this helps!
Some more links:
Xamarin Android Simulator Article: https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/android/deployment,_testing,_and_metrics/debug-on-emulator/android-sdk-emulator/
Xamarin University on Android Player: https://university.xamarin.com/resources/working-with-android-emulators
Intel HAXM: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-hardware-accelerated-execution-manager-intel-haxm