I have installed Visual studio 2015 Community edition and wanted to try Xamarin for Android/iOS development. Default installation for VS doesnt show me any installed emulator with visual studio.
I am new to mobile development and not sure which emulator to install. There are options like Visual studio Android Emulator for 2015. But it wont work on my Windows 10 home edition.
Please suggest.
As Toby suggested below. I used Xamarin Player. It is not straight forward process though. I did following steps if some one is interested.
1) Installed Xamarin Android Player.
2) Had Oracle VM Box manager installed previously as part of Android SDK(I think).
3) After installing Xamarin Android Player, It prompted for the device I wanted to use. I selected Nexus 5 KitKat. After downloading required files. I tried to run the device. Got another error!! Saying 'Xamarin Fail to initialize device'.
3) I opened Oracle VM and selected the device. Clicked on Settings > System > Base memory. Reduced base memory to 1024 MB. Saved the changes.
4) Opened Xamarin Studio and re-ran the device.
Success!!!
5) Came back to Visual Studio. It started to show me the device in Visual Studio. Ran the solution and Voila! App is indeed in visual studio.
Best Answer
That is correct. Visual Studio Emulator for Android works only with the Pro version or higher of the operating systems Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Instead of the Visual Studio Emulator for Android, you can test your Android application with the Android Player from Xamarin. The Xamarin Android Player works official with all version of Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. I use the Xamarin Android Player with Windows 10 without issues. Alternative you can use the Android Emulator from the SDK.