How to update Android emulator without Android Studio?

Question

I do not have Android Studio, just an Android SDK. When I launch one of my Android emulators using the Android Virtual Device Manager (AVD), I get the following message:

Your emulator is out of date, please update it by running Android Studio.

According to the steps, it seems that you could update the emulator even without Android Studio, just using the Android SDK Manager. However, the SDK Tools tab is missing.

Is the SDK manager that launches as a standalone application different from the SDK manager available in Android Studio?

In addition, as you can see, everything is updated, and the Android SDK Tools version is even newer than the version offered for download to the Android Website (25.2.3 at the time of writing this question).

So how do I update the emulator? I don't need / need Android Studio.

Answer 1

Starting with version 25.2.3, the standalone GUI SDK manager is deprecated ( https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/sdk-tools.html ). The instructions that you see in the launch window "Launch Android emulator" refer to updating via Android Studio. The SDK manager inside Android Studio is different from the standalone tool. We have added new SDKs that the old SDK Manager does not understand how to process and update, including the new emulator.

You have two ways to update the emulator:

1. Use the new command line SDK manager: $. / Sdkmanager --update ( https://developer.android.com/studio/command-line/sdkmanager.html )

2. Use the new SDK Manager in Android Studio: https://developer.android.com/studio/intro/update.html#sdk-manager.

Based on the output of the window, it also looks like your AVDs may be old, so you might want to create new AVDs or update them to get the latest features and improve emulator performance and stability.

SDK Tools release notes saying it is deprecated:

Answer 2

You can update the Android emulator without Android Studio using what I previously called "forced manual update" , and after discussing in this post, I found out some things regarding the standalone SDK:

It looks like the emulator as part of the Android SDK Tools) is no longer updated from version 25.2.3

Thus, the workaround involves " manual / forced update " of the emulator tools. Currently, I have successfully upgraded to version 27.3.8 (and am running Android 9).

Workaround

First, make sure that the base packages are still intact, and update the emulator as follows:

Instructions

• Download the latest version (or a suitable emulator) from the links below
• When done, unzip the downloaded emulator.zip file and extract the emulator package in %USERPROFILE%\Android\android-sdk\tools or the corresponding path (yes, you have to paste it into this folder since the emulator does not have all the libraries and files)
• After that, your emulator will be updated (to 27.3.8 in my case):

^{Android SDK manager (GUI)}

Now prepare your AVD as usual:

^{Android AVD manager}

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Important links

Base and Emulator Tools (zip)

• Android SDK Base Installer (standalone windows)
• Linux installer (you can also use wget)
• Emulator version 27.3.8 (linux)
• Emulator version 27.3.8 (windows)
• Emulator 27.3.8 (mac os)
• Emulator version 26.1.4 (windows)
• Emulator version 26.1.4 (linux)

• Emulator version 27.1.10 (Mac OS)

• Emulator version 28.0.22 (latest version of linux os)

• Emulator version 28.0.22 (latest version of windows os)

• Emulator version 28.0.22 (latest version for Mac)

  Update: Added latest emulator versions.

• Emulator version 29.0.11 (linux)

• Emulator version 29.0.11 (windows)

• Emulator version 29.0.11 (macos)

Our gratitude to androiddev for providing links for linux, eaglemt and Vladislav Panchenko for providing links to repositories, which is especially important for links on Mac OS.

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