Starting and Stopping the Emulator

During development and testing of your application, you install and run your application in the Android emulator. You can launch the emulator as a standalone application, from a command line, or you can use it as part of your Eclipse development environment. In either case, you specify the AVD configuration to load and any startup options you want to use, as described in this document.

You can run your application on a single instance of the emulator or, depending on your needs, you can start multiple emulator instances and run your application in more than one emulated device. You can use the emulator's built-in commands to simulate GSM phone calling or SMS between emulator instances, and you can set up network redirections that allow emulators to send data to one another. For more information, see Telephony Emulation, SMS Emulation, and Emulator Networking

To start an instance of the emulator from the command line, change to the tools/ folder of the SDK. Enter emulator command like this:

emulator -avd <avd_name>

This initializes the emulator and loads an AVD configuration (see the next section for more information about AVDs). You will see the emulator window appear on your screen.

If you are working in Eclipse, the ADT plugin for Eclipse installs your application and starts the emulator automatically, when you run or debug the application. You can specify emulator startup options in the Run/Debug dialog, in the Target tab. When the emulator is running, you can issue console commands as described later in this document.

If you are not working in Eclipse, see Installing Applications on the Emulator for information about how to install your application.

To stop an emulator instance, just close the emulator's window.