why are android emulators either nonexistent or utterly useless?

I totally get what OP is asking and am constantly annoyed by the same thing.

There's a ton of software that can ONLY be run on a mobile OS, and rather than deal with the nightmare that is a physical Android phone with all of its limitations and restrictions, it would be nice to have these things running in a VM that I can fully control. There's software that demands access to insane and ridiculous permissions, and I'm not going to install those to my physical Android phone and deal with the privacy problems. But a completely isolated VM with burner accounts that I can run in a window on the desktop I'm already using most of the time anyway? I'll take that. Also, I don't see the need to shell out the ridiculous price premiums for phone models with the most storage space when I only use a handful of apps when I'm mobile anyway. An app I might need two or three times a year still takes up that space on my phone when it could easily live on a VM and be used only when I need it at home.

Also, when Android releases new version updates and my phone manufacturer doesn't keep up? Why should I have to go out and buy a new phone just to appease the handful of apps that decide THEY want to be cutting edge and THEY'RE going to be the ones to force me to waste money? I should be able to just spin up another VM with the new Android version and use those sporadic apps on there until I decide to upgrade my phone in my own good time.

Also, Android X86 is fine, but the most problematic apps that mess with users and force apps to newer Android versions for no other reason than being "cutting-edge" aren't made by the kinds of companies with the forethought or customer focus to provide x86 compatible apks.

Basically, I don't see why it's so hard to run a full virtual, sandboxed ARM emulated vanilla Android environment, or why people aren't clamoring for this. It's the most practical, straightforward solution to the fragmentation/bad vendor update model that physical hardware forces on us and I assume most of us hate.

To do Android development, I got myself a Banana Pi, which is a Raspberry-Pi like single-board computer. They provide you with a rooted Android OS image that you can flash onto the device, and you can install whatever else you want onto it. I give it it's own display and keyboard, but can also SSH-into it and control it from my other computers.

The generic answer is usually that someone hasn't felt the need to create and release one.

Open source basically means you get whatever someone else felt like creating, and they'll usually create it to suit themselves first and foremost (which may mean having a poor user interface, or certain limitations or performance quirks).

BlueStacks is cross platform, but I have never used it so no idea what the performance is gonna be like.

Waydroid works at native speeds for me and on NixOS installation constituted adding virtualisation.waydroid.enable = true; to my config, running waydroid init -s GAPPS and then registering it on Google's website with the code it gives. Might be able to do it with just the nix package manager and not full blown NixOS but not sure about that

Unsure of the difficulties installing it but when it works it works flawlessly

There's one that you can download through Android Studio. It's pretty good if you have Linux as your host OS, as it will share your Linux kernel rather than emulating it. I guess by definition that's not an emulator, though, so it technically doesn't answer your question.

I haven't used it with Windows as my host OS since around 2016, but it was not very good back then.

Perhaps because scrcpy exists? It's very easy to mirror an Android device on the PC with it and control it with mouse and keyboard, and everybody has an Android device around. So why bother emulating one.

The ones with the most need to emulate are app developers and Android Studio does have an emulator included iirc.

I have not tried it but BlendOS claims native apk support iirc.

E: Ok, perhaps native is incorrect terminology, I just checked it and it seems to use WayDroid which was already mentioned in the thread. They ship with Aurora store and F-Droid, you can probably make those work on your distro too.

Do you mean emulators such as the Android emulator that comes with Android Studio, or is the latter lacking features that other software on windows possess?

I’ve been meaning to try this:

https://github.com/budtmo/docker-android

How is waydroid a hassle? also literally all android emulators ARE just android x86 in a VM, the VM of choice is typically virtualbox

Try shashlik

Instead of an emulator, what about a VM? Does that option exist?