The Android Emulator, unfortunately, doesn’t work in CircleCI’s conventional (Docker-based) Android build environment. With a little tinkering, though, we can make it work in another environment!
What Doesn’t Work
Since CircleCI 2.0, the recommended build environment for most projects is the Docker Executor. Overall, it’s great: Docker images are fast, portable, and cacheable. Chances are you can start with a prebuilt one.
One of the jobs in our current workflow boots up the circleci/android:api-29-node image in about four seconds with all the build tools we need. For building and publishing, this is fantastic.
Believe it or not, you can actually use VirtualBox to create your own Android emulator for Mac. Download VirtualBox on your Mac machine, and then set it up with the necessary ISO image from. Creative design. Android emulator, android for pc, Andy, Android Apps for PC, Android Games for PC. Play all your favorite android games. Directly from your PC or MAC Just launch andy from your desktop Run all your communication apps. From your desktop. Click File Settings Tools Emulator (or Android Studio Preferences Tools Emulator on macOS), then select Launch in a tool window and click OK. If the Emulator window didn't automatically appear, open it by clicking View Tool Windows Emulator. Start your virtual device using the AVD Manager or by targeting it when running your app.
Android Emulator Mac Free
Unfortunately, when you begin configuring your tests, you’ll soon realize that this environment can’t run the Emulator.
Why?
To achieve reasonable performance, the Android Emulator needshardware acceleration, which depends on supporting capabilities from the processor and operating system. We can use the Emulator’s -accel-check flag to interrogate a system’s compatibility. Here’s what it says in a CircleCI Docker environment:
(That means “no.”)
But wait! Docker is but one of several executors available on CircleCI. What if we use a conventional Linux VM instead of Docker? (This is called the machine executor).
That doesn’t work either. Bummer.
At this point, you might heed CircleCI’s advice and pursue a third-party service like Firebase Test Lab or AWS Device Farm, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet.
What Works
We were already using CircleCI’s MacOS support to build and test our React Native app for iOS. I had one last wacky idea to try: could we run the Android Emulator on MacOS?
Mac Os Emulator For Android
It works!
Configuration
Without the convenience of an externally-maintained Docker image, it’s on you to install the Android tools. If you want to try Android testing on MacOS, hopefully our configuration can save you some time:
And here’s install-android-tools.sh:
Conclusion
It’s unorthodox, but this approach has worked reasonably well so far for our small React Native project. One set of Appium tests can run against both iOS and Android, and they run the same way in CircleCI that they do locally.
I’d be interested to hear about your experiences with Android UI tests in CircleCI, whether via a third-party service, a CI host that supports the Emulator, or another approach altogether.