Basic Guide To Android Emulators

During the long journey of getting started with mobile development, there are a lot of unexpected roadblocks that you will surely run into. This article is a quick guide to get around one of them and make your day a little bit easier.

This article is for people who already have Android Studio installed or are wishing to do a standard install. If you want to you can do some of these steps in the custom install process when you first install Android Studio. A good blog for guiding you through a custom install can be found here.

Alrighty at this point I am assuming that you have Android Studio installed on your device. First up you need to open Android Studio and look to the bottom right corner. There you will spot a dropdown called config, open this and select SDK manager.

From there you will be taken the the Android SDK settings and firstly you will want to add the SDK Platform versions you want to test on. From there move onto the SDK Tools page.

When you are on the SDK Tools page all you need to do for this exercise is select the Android Emulator check box, hit apply, and follow the install instructions.

After the install is complete you can close the settings screen and open a new or existing project.

Next up you’ll want to look in the top right corner for this cute little guy.

Once you’ve selected the Android Virtual Device menu hit add new device and you will be directed to the Select Hardware menu for the new device. Here I am going to use a Google Pixel 2 for my example but feel free to select any device you want.

Now you have selected the device you wish to use you need to choose a System Image (pretty much the OS version you want to use). Simply hit download and go through the install process, then you will land on the Android Virtual Device page.

On this page you can rename your device and adjust many other settings but for the sake of keeping it simple just focus of the name and then hit finish.

Now for the lucky last step! Here you can edit the emulator settings with the pencil drop down. Alternatively you can run the emulator with the play button.

CONGRATS! It actually worked. From here you can build to your hearts content!