Using Android Studio Emulators in M1 Mac:
Bluestacks Android Emulator for macOS. Certain emulators are easy to install and run. Bluestacks Android. Android Emulator for Macbook M1 - posted in Mac OS: Hello all, I am looking for an Android emulator for Macbook PRO M1. I have tried Bluestack, NOX and Genymotion but they are not working.
Previously, when M1 Macbooks were released, Android studio didn’t have any support for emulators. Google has released a different preview build for emulators. You can check this build here.
The problem with this preview build is that you can’t change the emulator device type. It works, but if you want to test your application on different device or different screen sizes, there was no other option available.
Recently, they released one change to the Android Studio SDK manager and downloading an extra emulator is no loger needed now.
In this post, I will quickly show you how to create Android Emulators on M1 chipset mac in Android Studio.
How to do that:
First, make sure that you have the latest Android Studio installed. If you have 4.1.2 or later Android studio version, this will work.
First, start AVD manager. If you haven’t created any AVD or android virtual device before, you will find it in Tools->AVD Manager.
Click on Create new virtual device button. It will show you a list of different devices. You can select any of these phones.
Emulator For M1 Mac
- Click on next. It will show you a list of system images. Basically, it shows different images for different Android Versions that can be used with the current AVD. Make sure to select the ‘Other image’ tab. Images listed under this tab are designed for Macbook M1.
That’s all. It will create one emulator using that selected image. You can also create different virtual devices using the same image.
This is the second post that I dedicate to talk about configurations using the new M1 Apple processor. As I said in the previous post, these configurations are workarounds until stable versions are released, however, for me, they have been useful and I guess that someone in the same situation as me can benefit from that.
Using Android studio in the new Macbook Air
When you install Android Studio you will get the following warning:
Unable to install Intel® HAXM
Your CPU does not support VT-x.
Unfortunately, your computer does not support hardware-accelerated virtualization.
Here are some of your options:
1 - Use a physical device for testing
2 - Develop on a Windows/OSX computer with an Intel processor that supports VT-x and NX
3 - Develop on a Linux computer that supports VT-x or SVM
4 - Use an Android Virtual Device based on an ARM system image
(This is 10x slower than hardware-accelerated virtualization)
Creating Android virtual device
Android virtual device Pixel_3a_API_30_x86 was successfully created
And also in the Android virtual device (AVD) screen you will read the following warning:
If you want to learn more regarding virtualization in processors you can read the following Wikipedia article, the thing is that our M1 processor doesn’t support VT-x, however, we have options to run an Android Virtual Device.
As the previous message was telling us, we have 4 options. The easiest way to proceed is to use a physical device, but what if you haven’t one available at the moment you are developing?
Mac M1 Android Emulator Download
From now on, we will go with the option of using an Android virtual device based on an ARM system image as options 2 and 3 are not possible to execute.
Using the virtual emulator
Mac M1 Android Emulator
The only thing that you have to do is to download the last available emulator for Apple silicon processors from Github https://github.com/741g/android-emulator-m1-preview/releases/tag/0.2
Once you have downloaded you have to right-click to the .dmg file and click open to skip the developer verification.
Mac M1 Android Emulator No Internet Connection
After installing the virtual emulator, we have to open it from the Applications menu.
After opening it you will see Virtual emulator in Android Studio available to deploy your Android application. Make sure to have Project tools available in Android Studio (View -> Tool Windows -> Project)
After pressing the launch button you will get your Android application running in your ARM virtual emulator :-)
Conclusion
In this post, we have seen that is possible to install Android Studio in Macbook Air M1 and use a virtual device even that your M1 doesn’t support VT-x. You can learn more about this emulator in the following references: