Enabling snapshots allows the emulator to start up much faster, becoming ready for use in a matter of seconds.

The first time an emulator is started with snapshots enabled, the plugin waits until the emulator has finished booting, unlocks the screen, and then saves the emulator state to disk.
For subsequent builds, the emulator is started directly from this stored state. This means that Android has already finished booting, is sitting on the home screen, with the screen unlocked; i.e. ready for use.

At the end of a build, the emulator state is not persisted to the snapshot file — subsequent jobs will always start from the same, clean state that was stored at the start of the first snapshot-enabled build.

Should the emulator already have snapshots in place, these will be neither read nor overwritten — the plugin always writes its state to a separate snapshot file called "jenkins".

Note: Using snapshots will consume around 150–200MB of disk space on the build slave, for each emulator.