How to update Android emulator without Android Studio?

It is possible to update Android emulator without Android Studio using what I previously described as the "forced manual upgrade" and following the discussion in that post, I figured out some things concerning the standalone SDK:

It seems the emulator (originally distributed as part of the Android SDK Tools) is no longer updated since version 25.2.3

Thus the workaround involves a "manual/forced upgrade" of emulator tools. Currently I successfully upgraded to version 27.3.8 (and running Android 9 smoothly).

The workaround

Firstly make sure the base packages are still intact, and upgrade the emulator as follows:

Instructions

  • Download the latest (or suitable emulator) from the links supplied below
  • When done, decompress the downloaded emulator.zip file and extract the emulator package to %USERPROFILE%\Android\android-sdk\tools or relevant path (yes you have to merge it into that folder, since the emulator doesn't have all libraries and files)
  • After this your emulator will be updated (to 27.3.8 in my case):

enter image description here

Android SDK manager (GUI)

Now prepare your AVD as usual:

enter image description here

Android AVD manager

Important links

Base and Emulator tools(zip)

  • Android SDK base installer (offline windows)
  • Linux installer (can use wget also)
  • Emulator version 27.3.8 (linux)
  • Emulator version 27.3.8 (windows)
  • Emulator 27.3.8 (mac os)
  • Emulator version 26.1.4 (windows)
  • Emulator version 26.1.4 (linux)

  • Emulator version 27.1.10 (mac os)

  • Emulator version 28.0.22 (latest linux os latest)

  • Emulator version 28.0.22 (windows os latest)

  • Emulator version 28.0.22(mac os latest)

    Update: Added latest emulator versions

  • Emulator version 29.0.11 (linux)

  • Emulator version 29.0.11 (windows)

  • Emulator version 29.0.11 (macos)

Special thanks to androiddev for providing links for linux, eaglemt and Vladyslav Panchenko for providing the links to repos and mostly important for mac os links.


The standalone GUI SDK Manager is deprecated as of SDK Tools v25.2.3.

The instructions you see in the "Starting Android Emulator" run window are specific to updating via Android Studio. The SDK Manager inside of Android Studio is different than the standalone tool. We added new SDK packages that the old SDK Manager does not understand how to process nor update, including the new Emulator.

You have two ways going forward to update the emulator:

  1. Use the new command line SDK Manager: $ ./sdkmanager --update Read more here

  2. Use the new SDK Manager in Android Studio

Based on the window output, it also looks like your AVDs might be old, so you may want to create new AVDs or update for the latest features and better emulator performance & stability.

SDK Tools Release Notes saying it has been deprecated: enter image description here


This is what you can do to update to the most recent version that can be found here: https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/emulator

# go to your SDK directory
cd $ANDROID_HOME 

# remove old emulator version
rm -r emulator

# this will fetch the version from Canary channel
# keep in mind that this might be unstable
sdkmanager "emulator" --channel=3

For some reason this:

sdkmanager --install "emulator;31.2.6" --channel=3

did not work for me, that's why I had to remove the old version.

Tags:

Android

Android Sdk Tools

Android Emulator

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