Why is Jenkins Android Emulator Plugin recreating my Emulator Snapshots in every build?
A bug was introduced in SDK Tools r20, whereby trying to list the available snapshots (via the emulator -snapshot-list command) would result in a crash.
Since the command crashes without listing the available snapshots, the Android Emulator Plugin believes that there are no existing snapshots, which causes a new snapshot to be created in every build.
I discovered that these crashes only occur with certain versions of the emulator application, i.e. it is possible to avoid the crash.
Thankfully, the Jenkins plugin lets you select the emulator binary to run.
So you can work around this problem by going into your job configuration, pressing Advanced… in the emulator config and selecting the "emulator-arm" (or another) binary.
In addition to Christopher Orr's answer, there is another possible cause. In my environment, emulator -snapshot-list listed the size of my snapshot as "1.0G". The pattern that matches snapshots in the Android Emulator Plugin as of 2014-01-14 matches whole number megabyte values.
I submitted a pull request to address that cause.