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You are here: GeekSays Technology News » Android » How To Emulate Android On A Windows PC Using the Android SDK

How To Emulate Android On A Windows PC Using the Android SDK

Last updated on October 20, 2014 By Lori Mkhize Leave a Comment

Building and testing Android apps on your PC can greatly boost your productivity. First up though, you need to setup a virtualized Android environment on your PC and that’s basically what we’re going to cover in this tutorial.

Since Android is an open-source project, its core source code is accessible to anyone via the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). This is basically what you need to emulate Android on a PC.

Android-SDK

The Requirements

Let’s begin by going over the basic requirements needed to emulate Android on Windows.

  1. A Windows Machine: You obviously need a computer running any Windows version newer than XP.
  2. Java: You also need to have Java installed on your machine as it is needed by the SDK bundle to work. Install the latest version of Java for your system.

You also need the latest version of Android SDK. Download the zip file and extract to a folder. You will see a folder called ‘adt-bundle-windows-x86_64-20140321’. (I’m using Windows 8 on a 64-bit machine). Inside this folder there are two other folders named ‘eclipse’ and ‘sdk’, as well as an executable file called ‘SDK Manager’.

sdk1

 

Click on ‘SDK Manager’ so that the SDK Manager window opens. This is where you can select and install the sub-packages you need. Select the Android version you want to virtualize and then click on the (>) button beside your chosen Android version.

Note: For this tutorial, we only need three sub-packages:

  • SDK Platform
  • ARM EABI v7a System Image
  • Google APIs

Install the packages by clicking ‘Install Packages’.

Creating The Android Virtual Device (AVD)

It’s now time to try out a virtual Android device.

  1. In the SDK Manager window, browse to Tools > Manage AVDs. This should open the Android Virtual Device Manager.

When you click on the New button, a new window will open with ‘Create new Android Virtual Device (AVD)’. Configure the AVD as per these details:

AVD Name:AVD 1
Device:Galaxy Nexus 7 (2012) (7″, 800 x 1280: tvdpi)
Target:Android 4.2.2 – API Level 19
CPU/ABI:ARM (armeabi-v7a)
Keyboard:Checked
Skin:Checked
Front Camera:None
Back Camera:None
Memory Options – RAM:768
Memory Options – VM Heap:32
Internal Storage:200 MiB
SD Card – Size:500 MiB
Emulation Options- Snapshot:Unchecked
Emulation Options – Use Host GPU:Unchecked

You should now be able to view your new Android device in the list of existing Android devices in AVD Manager. You can now go ahead and start it: in the same AVD Manager window, select your new device and click Start…

sdk2

 

Here is what it should look like after it has fully started.

sdk3

And there you have it.  Feel free to click around and get a feel of the virtual Android interface on your machine.

 

Filed Under: Android, Android Tutorials, How To

About Lori Mkhize

I am student blogger, tech savvy and like most women love shopping! I have got a bit of geek in me and this is where I explore it. I love online computer games and hate anything slow.

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