This week, Google released a major update to the Android Development Tools, as well as SDK Tools r9.
Android Police’s Artem Russakovski highlighted some of the new features and improvements.
One significant improvement is the ability to boot virtual devices quickly. Rather than waiting what seemed like an eternity for a virtual device to boot, they now can be started almost instantly with a new “snapshot” feature.
“The way this instant restart business works is not ideal, in my opinion, but is still very useful once you figure out how to use it,” Russakovski said. “The general idea is that you can save a checkpoint when closing the emulator and then use this checkpoint to almost instantly bring it back up, rather than boot the emulator from scratch.”