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.
