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d-centralize handbook

Setting up an Android emulator

This document will guide you through the setup of a smoothly running emulator. Some tweaks are needed which are not very well documented.

Come up with a name for the AVD and determine which package and ABI to use. The package can be determined checking the installed system-images;* packages using sdkmanager --list --verbose.

The ABI can be determined as a path from $ANDROID_HOME/system-images/$PACKAGE/$IMAGE

An example AVD van be created using the following command:

Terminal window
avdmanager create avd \
    --name Nougat \
    --package 'system-images;android-25;google_apis;x86' \
    --abi google_apis/x86

When asked to create a custom hardware profile, answer yes.

When asked for the options hw.audioInput and hw.audioOutput, set them to no. This will greatly reduce memory usage.

For the option hw.gpu.enabled, set it to yes. This will make the emulator run much smoother.

It is possible to tweak these settings later in ~/.android/avd/<name>.avd/config.ini.

The emulator can now be stared using:

Terminal window
emulator -use-system-libs -avd <name>