Macos Android Emulator

The Android Emulator, unfortunately, doesn’t work in CircleCI’s conventional (Docker-based) Android build environment. With a little tinkering, though, we can make it work in another environment!

The Mac OS is very user friendly and has amazing features coupled with a truly interactive interface. Below is a list of the top 5 Android emulators for Mac, you can easily choose one and get the best Android emulator for Mac OS. 5 Best Android Emulators for Mac OS. Setup Android Emulator on Mac OS X. The purpose of this section is to guide you to create in your development environment an Android emulator. Android emulators are managed through a UI called AVD Manager. AVD Manager has a nice interface when started from Android Studio. Start Android Studio app, then create a blank project. To run the emulator in Android Studio, make sure you're using Android Studio 4.1 with version 30.0.10 or higher of the Android Emulator, then follow these steps: Click File Settings Tools Emulator (or Android Studio Preferences Tools Emulator on macOS), then select Launch in a tool window and click OK. If the Emulator window didn't.

What Doesn’t Work

Google Os Android

Since CircleCI 2.0, the recommended build environment for most projects is the Docker Executor. Overall, it’s great: Docker images are fast, portable, and cacheable. Chances are you can start with a prebuilt one.

One of the jobs in our current workflow boots up the circleci/android:api-29-node image in about four seconds with all the build tools we need. For building and publishing, this is fantastic.

Unfortunately, when you begin configuring your tests, you’ll soon realize that this environment can’t run the Emulator.

Why?

To achieve reasonable performance, the Android Emulator needshardware acceleration, which depends on supporting capabilities from the processor and operating system. We can use the Emulator’s -accel-check flag to interrogate a system’s compatibility. Here’s what it says in a CircleCI Docker environment:

(That means “no.”)

But wait! Docker is but one of several executors available on CircleCI. What if we use a conventional Linux VM instead of Docker? (This is called the machine executor).

That doesn’t work either. Bummer.

Os Android Download

At this point, you might heed CircleCI’s advice and pursue a third-party service like Firebase Test Lab or AWS Device Farm, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet.

Sound

What Works

We were already using CircleCI’s MacOS support to build and test our React Native app for iOS. I had one last wacky idea to try: could we run the Android Emulator on MacOS?

Macos Android Emulator Not Starting

It works!

Configuration

Android

Mac Os Android Simulator

Macos android emulator no sound

Without the convenience of an externally-maintained Docker image, it’s on you to install the Android tools. If you want to try Android testing on MacOS, hopefully our configuration can save you some time:

And here’s install-android-tools.sh:

Conclusion

Macos Android Emulator M1

It’s unorthodox, but this approach has worked reasonably well so far for our small React Native project. One set of Appium tests can run against both iOS and Android, and they run the same way in CircleCI that they do locally.

I’d be interested to hear about your experiences with Android UI tests in CircleCI, whether via a third-party service, a CI host that supports the Emulator, or another approach altogether.