Go through the initial setup (there isn’t much!) and then drag the Gapps zip file onto the screen of the device:Īt this point, if you don’t have the Android SDK installed, you’ll get this: Otherwise skip ahead! When it’s downloaded, start your device by using the Green ‘play’ icon and let Android start up. Here, I’m using an Android 5.1 device, so grab that file: Whilst you’re waiting for the profile to download, you’ll want to grab a copy of the Google Play Store and Google Apps from here: Ĭhoose the version that corresponds with the device type that you’re installing. (Let me know in the comments if this isn’t correct!) Next, select a device that you wish to run – I choose the 10.1″ Lollipop “Nexus 10” device and clicked Install profile.Īs far as I can tell, the emulator will use as much CPU as the host computer will give it – there is no throttling involved. I uninstalled the default profiles by using the ‘uninstall profile’ icon:

These are the specifications of the virtual devices that you want to launch. You’ll be prompted to sign in with your Microsoft account – you can just use a free Hotmail account if you wish.Īt this point you’ll be prompted to setup “profiles”. Once installed, launch it from the Start Menu: This is totally free and doesn’t require a Visual Studio/MSDN subscription. I’ve tried this on my machine development machine (i7 5960x, 32GB RAM) and a lower-end test machine (i5 2400, 12GB RAM) and both work perfectly with no lag.įirst, you’ll want to download the Visual Studio Emulator for Android from here: This guide assumes you already have Hyper-V installed, and that you have a fairly powerful machine. Personally, I don’t like it as it’s very invasive and the service that it installs kept crashing but YMMV.

Note: if you’re in this just to run Android apps on your pc and you’re not a developer, you might want to consider BlueStacks ( Google Bing it). I did however, have a Windows tablet with an internet connection to my development machine which does have an Android device, albeit a virtual one! Recently I was in a situation where I needed to demonstrate an Android App to a client, but didn’t have an Android device with me.

Android emulator for mac 2016