suppose I want to just run the android emulator *as a phone* on my desktop

Question

Suppose I have a MacBook Pro, but I don't have an Android phone and I just want to run Android apps in the emulator on my desktop; I don't want it to make phone calls, but I do want it to talk to the internet and install apps (so I can use them). Is there an easy way to do this without spending hours reading Android SDK docs? I used to run the Android SDK emulator while I was developing an app for it and now it seems much more complex.

Answer 1

You have full internet connection in emulators. But to install apps you need something…

• You need the APK files. It is easy to install an APK in konsole/ terminal with Android Debug Bridge ( adb ):

   $ cd /path-to-Android-SDK/platform-tools $ adb install /path-to-APK-file 

• You need the app Play Store if you want apps on Google Play. Unfortunately Google don't provide it for emulators.

Answer 2

要在桌面上运行Goolge Play应用程序，请使用Blue Stacks软件，它运行Android Gingerbread 2.3并且运行良好。

Answer 3

Basically, in order to run apps in your emulator, it needs to support the Google Play services, and that is currently not available in any of the currently supported emulator versions (regardless of which system image you use).

There are some hacks, to enable this, but you will need to put some effort into getting it to work (it does require some extra steps, which I have never got working).