How To Set up the Android Emulator on your new M1 Mac

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NB: This guide is outdated. Please see my most recent article on installing the Android Emulator on your M1:

How to set up an Android Emulator on your new M1 Mac (May 2021)

Hi! Today I’ll briefly walk you through installation of Google’s Android emulator for the M1 chip.

1. Go here: https://github.com/google/android-emulator-m1-preview/releases. This is the Releases page for the official google M1 android emulator. It’s updated with the most recent release. Click where it says “Assets” and download the dmg.
2. Drag the dmg into your Applications folder.
3. The first time you open it, you’ll need to right click the Android Emulator icon and then skip past the developer identity verification step
4. If you’ve installed Android Studio and Android SDK and adb is available, the emulator should be visible from Studio and work (deploy built apps, debug apps, etc).
5. You’ll get a popup on startup about not being able to find the ADB path. This is expected: ADB will still notice the emulator if you have it installed.

So, that was nice and simple.

After this I had a minor problem where the emulator wasn’t connected to the internet, which can be a common issue for emulators in general. To solve this, I followed this StackOverflow answer, which I’ve summarised below.

Change the DNS address of your network to 8.8.8.8 (Google’s DNS):

• Go to System Preferences > Network
• Select the network you’re connected to
• Click “Advanced”
• Select “DNS”, Select the “+” button, type “8.8.8.8” (Google’s DNS) or if you prefer OpenDNS, “208.67.222.222”
• click “Ok” > click “Apply”
• Restart your emulator
• Done!

For more information (including configuration), see the Google README here.