Macos M1 Android Emulator

You might be seen an emulator error running on Apple Silicon (Macbook Pro/Air M1) 'Your CPU does not support VT-x' in Android Studio.There is an arm64 versio. Android Emulator for M1. Who would have thought that Android Emulators would be a headache!?!?!! Rosetta 2 is amazing, but when it comes to the default Android Emulator it falls over because it can not run Kernel extensions and doesn't support VMs that are doing x8664 virtualization.

  1. Macbook M1 Android Studio Emulator

Yesterday the emulator was working perfectly. The system image was arm64-v8a. I don’t exactly remember the Release name of the working system image but, yesterday there was an update for the ARM 64 system image which I accepted and the release name is “S”.

I can start the emulator from my AVD Manager, the emulator also starts when I press the ‘Run app’ button however, the app isn’t loaded on the emulator and the emulator appears offline if I check through “adb devices” or if I click on “Troubleshoot Device connections” it shows:

Macos M1 Android Emulator

“emulator-5554 – Device is currently in the offline state”

I have tried most of the suggestions found on StackOverflow like:

  • adb kill-server, adb start-server

  • Remove and re-create AVD device

  • Invalidate Caches/Restart

  • Enable USB debugging inside the emulator

  • Wipe data and cold boot from AVD manager

    I am using Android Studio 4.1.3

    Build #AI-201.8743.12.41.7199119, built on March 10, 2021Runtime version: 1.8.0_242-release-1644-b3-6915495 x86_64VM: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM by JetBrains s.r.omacOS 10.16GC: ParNew, ConcurrentMarkSweepMemory: 1981MCores: 8Registry: ide.new.welcome.screen.force=true, external.system.auto.import.disabled=trueNon-Bundled Plugins: org.jetbrains.kotlin

AVD:

Any idea what has gone wrong? Or how to tackle this issue?

Answer

Macos M1 Android EmulatorMacos m1 android emulator

Replace the avd system images you have downloaded with the r02 images. r03 is broken for me but reverting to r02 saved the day!

With the latest android (4.1.3) on macOS, the directory you want to put the unzipped images in is probably something like ~/Library/Android/sdk/system-images/android-S.

Macbook M1 Android Studio Emulator

For example, the path for the google play image is ~/Library/Android/sdk/system-images/android-S/google_apis_playstore/arm64-v8a