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
Best 10 Android Emulators to Run Android Apps on Mac OS X ARC Welder This Android emulator software for Mac has been developed by Google. It is meant for Mac systems specifically using the Chrome web browser. It doesn’t need any Google invite to run on your Mac. Andy Android Emulator for Mac. Andy is a high-end Android Emulator. It’s a powerful as well as a heavy Android Emulator designed for Mac and PC. Andy Emulator comes as a package installer with many apps. It works on a separate Virtual Machine, so the installer file will be much high compared to other Android Emulators.
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.
MacOS – Android Studio emulator not launching on macOS (Big Sur) macOS Big Sur 11.1, Android Studio 4.1.2. Based on some similar issues I found online, I attempted to uninstall and reinstall Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM installer)from Android Studio itself. But also got an error: Installation did not complete successfully. Mac compatibility: Sounds obvious, but not all emulators run on macOS. If you'd like a little more information about using these emulators, take a look at How to run Android apps on Mac. The perfect Android emulator. Supports keyboard, gamepad, script recording and multiple instances. Every feature is perfect for your gaming experience only. Open keyboard mapping only with one-click, get the real PC like gaming experience by setting the controls on keyboard, mouse, or gamepad. Run multiple instances at the same time to play.
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.
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.”)
Macos Android Emulator Bluetooth
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?
It works!
Os Android Terbaru
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.