Create and setup Android Virtual Device (AVD) – android simulator

In this post, we will see step by step guide to create and setup Android Virtual Device, an Android emulator

What is an emulator

Emulator is something which closely resembles real device like mobile or tablet, where we can set the configuration such as RAM, OS version, processor, sd memory space, camera etc.

Android SDK gives an option to create emulator based on required specifications. so Android Virtual Device (AVD) comes with Android SDK.

Download

• Navigate to android.com/studio and click on “DOWNLOAD ANDROID STUDIO” specific to your OS.
• Open the Android studio, create a dummy project just to access the menu bar options.
• In menu bar, navigate to Tools > SDK Manager
• Navigate to System Settings > Android SDK, you will see 3 tabs “SDK Platforms”, “SDK Tools”, “SDK Update Sites”

To download the android simulator, check the following options

Under the SDK Platforms tab –

• Check the needed Android API level [version]  and check the “Show package details” option

Note – when a new version of android appears, you can check the latest version and download, which we will use to install as OS in android emulator.

Under the SDK Tools tab –

Check options such as

• Android SDK Build-Tools
• Android Emulator
• Android SDK platform-tools
• Android SDK tools
• Google Play services
• Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM)

Under SDK Update Sites tab –

Check all options

and click on OK and wait all required components will be completed.

Android Emulator

• Open Android Studio, navigate to Tools > AVD Manager
• On the manager dialog, click on “Create Virtual Device…” to create a new emulator
• Select “Phone” from category section and choose a handset model from the available list and click Next

• Select appropriate android API level [version] from the list displayed and click Next
• Change or leave as it is the name of the AVD and click Finish

Now the above steps will launch a new android emulator to install and test mobile applications

Every time you want to launch the emulator,

• Open the android studio
• Tools > AVD Manager
• Click on the play icon from the available emulators to launch

There are other ways also to launch the emulator with out android studio, refer here