December 4, 2011

Custom IceCreamSandwich Emulator Build

A few times a week you can catch me scouring the Android related threads on Google Groups. I find it to be a great way to learn a few tips and tricks. Throughout the past weeks I have seen the same questions arise time after time. How do I create a custom emulator image? How do I put the Market on the emulator? Since these questions were asked so much, and I had never used the emulator before, I decided to give it a shot. As you can see in the screen shot, the end result left me with an emulator that was rooted and had all the G-Apps (including Market). 

To build this emulator you will need to sync my source and choose "pete_emulator-eng" in the lunch menu. More information on how to get my source and what changes I made to create this emulator can be found on my GitHub. I should also mention that this emulator image has the same developer apps that come with the sdk image. I decided to leave these apps because they can be useful tools for developers creating their own apps.

Since we are on the subject of emulators, check out the amazing skins by Heiko Behrens!

7 comments:

  1. First! Great job, Pete!

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  2. "lunch menu" ? , you mean launch menu .

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    1. No, I do in fact mean "lunch" menu.

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  3. i have a weird question which i believe is totally unrelated to this post but i was trying to get tap to focus on an already built rom by cybergr and since you successfully got it i was wondering how to do it. apologies for posting here i was trying to find a way to write to you.

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  4. Hey, I'd like to compile for vbox_x86 but you haven't specified how you added gapps. Did you mount the image first?

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    1. I created a vendor setup that puts things like gapps in the build: https://github.com/peteralfonso/platform_vendor_pete

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  5. Hey, I downloaded GPA19 for my OG droid and I wanted to use the emulator to try it out, and I was wondering how do I get a system.img file so I can put it in my avd folder and run the rom in the emulator? Thanks!

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