Why is the iOS emulator far faster than Android's?

Question

How come iOS's emulator is faster than Android's? I'm using the iOS emulator on a less-able Mac and it's far smoother than Android's emulator which is running on a laptop with greater specs than the Mac.

I've read somewhere that it's because Android emulates ARM, whereas, iOS runs it natively in OS X. So how come Android emulators are not just made to directly run like iOS? I know nobody can truly answer this but still. I hope someone can shed some light on this rather frustrating issue.

Answer 1

Because the iOS "emulator" is not an emulator... it's a simulator.

From this answer:

the difference between emulators and simulators is that emulators mimic the software and hardware environments found on actual devices. Simulators, on the other hand, only mimic the software environment; they otherwise have access to all of the host system's hardware resources such as disk space, memory and processor speed.

Answer 2

For faster emulator check this link and section about Intel VT:
http://developer.android.com/tools/devices/emulator.html
You can also speed up emulator using GPU acceleration (Section Configuring Graphics Acceleration) or this blog article (which also answers your question and explain difference between x86 and ARM "emulation" in Android environment):
http://android-developers.blogspot.cz/2012/04/faster-emulator-with-better-hardware.html