Android emulators, especially older ones, are known to be slow. This is due to the fact that they should not only run the OS in the OS, but also must emulate the architecture of the ARM processor on an x86 or x64 processor. This makes them pretty slow.
However, you get Intel images for ICS, which are built for x86 and are faster. You can also try using old emulators. They gradually slowed down to honeycombs. You can also try to increase the RAM of the emulator and get a slight increase in speed.
In addition, you can leave the emulator running as soon as it will test your applications much faster, since you do not need to run it every time.
However, I personally would recommend testing on the device, since you will never get the same quality and accuracy when debugging on the emulator.
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