Installing Applications on the Emulator

If you don't have access to Eclipse or the ADT Plugin, you can install your application on the emulator using the adb utility. Before installing the application, you need to package it in a .apk file using the Android Asset Packaging Tool. Once the application is installed, you can start the emulator from the command line, as described in this document, using any startup options necessary. When the emulator is running, you can also connect to the emulator instance's console to issue commands as needed.

As you update your code, you periodically package and install it on the emulator. The emulator preserves the application and its state data across restarts, in a user-data disk partition. To ensure that the application runs properly as you update it, you may need to delete the emulator's user-data partition. To do so, start the emulator with the -wipe-data option. For more information about the user-data partition and other emulator storage, see Working with Emulator Disk Images.