Starting Android emulator from command line

If you have Android Studio installed, but you do not want to run the whole IDE just to start the Android emulator, you can start the emulator alone directly from the command line.

If you do not remember exactly the name of the virtual device you want to run, you can list all available devices by:

• emulator -list-avds

When you know the name of the system image, start it like this, prepending the machine name with -avd or @ :

• emulator @Nexus_5X_API_27

If you encounter an error message like “Could not launch” … “qemu-system-i386” … “No such file or directory”, something may be wrong with your path. The quick and dirty solution is to change into the emulator subdirectory of Android/Sdk, where the emulator executable lives, and run the command from there.

If it still fails you may be having a 64 bit system which is not configured to run 32 bit executable code.

To fix that, run:

• sudo dpkg –add-architecture i386
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libncurses5:i386 libstdc++6:i386

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