Visual Studio Android Emulator won't run application

Like the other commenters, this is most likely just a symptom of slow emulator on your machine. I'm running Xamarin-Android development on my 2010-era OSX machine in mavericks with 8GB RAM, and it is slow-slow-slow, but usable. Try to find the Intel x86 speeds improvements (look for HAXM) and you will find that the emulator will be much much faster.

And yeah, get a real handset and plug it in to your computer: always much faster than emulation.

later edit Get Genymotion for Mac OSX or for PC/Windows or PC/Linux. It's way way way faster than the other emulators. I have since found that this is as fast, or faster, than running the App on my connected Android phone. It's certainly simpler in not having to have the device plugged into one of my USB ports, and allows me to code and test on the train. http://www.genymotion.com/

Don't know if my issue was the same but finally this troubleshooting helped me to run emulator https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt228282.aspx#ADB. I was missing key Android SDK Tools with string value Path in registry Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node

I've created it manually and it worked.

UPDATE

Before I got the issue with running emulator, I couldn't see it in Visual Studio. The reason was I've installed VS Android Emulator through standalone installation, not through VS Installer. It had to be installed there as well.

I had the similar issue, and then I deleted the existing device simulator and reinstalled again and it started working.