Some Notes About Android Virtual Devices

November 11 2018 • 1 min read

android

This post was published in 2018 and is kept here for reference. It may contain information that's outdated or inaccurate.

Running AVD emulator from the Windows command line/Powershell/mingw32

This assumes you’ve got Android Studio installed.

First you need to have the tools path in your $PATH variable, to do this edit Path in Windows’ Environment variables to include for example:

C:\Users\Max\AppData\Local\Android\Sdk\tools

Then you can use emulator.exe from anywhere. The Android Studio docs fail to mention this.

$ emulator -no-boot-anim -accel auto -writable-system -no-snapshot -gpu host -avd K10_API_22

Installing Google Play Services

I’ve been messing around with older device profiles, and trying to run things in Chrome on Android 5.0 (API level 21).

You’ll need to sideload the Google Play services system APKs (from a gapps package for your target system, e.g. for Android 5.0, but you might find that the /system partition is full.

No problem, you can sideload to /sdcard and symlink:

$ adb remount
# Fails...
$ adb push .\GmsCore.apk /system/priv-app
$ adb: error: failed to copy '.\GmsCore.apk' to '/system/priv-app/GmsCore.apk': No space left on device

# Works...
$ adb push .\GmsCore.apk /sdcard/system/priv-app
$ adb push .\GoogleLoginService.apk /sdcard/system/priv-app
$ adb push .\GoogleServicesFramework.apk /sdcard/system/priv-app
$ adb push .\Phonesky.apk /sdcard/system/priv-app

# Symlink them
$ adb shell ln -s /sdcard/system/priv-app/GmsCore.apk /system/priv-app/GmsCore.apk
$ adb shell ln -s /sdcard/system/priv-app/GoogleLoginService.apk /system/priv-app/GoogleLoginService.apk
$ adb shell ln -s /sdcard/system/priv-app/GoogleServicesFramework.apk /system/priv-app/GoogleServicesFramework.apk
$ adb shell ln -s /sdcard/system/priv-app/Phonesky.apk /system/priv-app/Phonesky.apk
$ adb shell stop
$ adb shell start

Messing around with /etc/hosts

It’s trivial to edit the /etc/hosts on your AVD, but it only works if you have blank new line at the end of the hosts file.

$ adb pull /etc/hosts hosts
$ nano hosts # make your changes to the hosts file locally...
$ adb push hosts /etc/hosts

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Max Glenister