AvdBuddy

AvdBuddy is a native macOS app for managing Android Virtual Devices without going through Android Studio.

It focuses on the common emulator workflow:

• browse your existing AVDs from a visual home screen
• launch an emulator with a double click
• create new AVDs through a guided wizard
• duplicate, rename, and delete AVDs
• download Android system images from Google when needed

What It Does

AvdBuddy reads the Android SDK and local AVD setup on your Mac, then gives you a faster UI for:

• viewing all AVDs in one place
• distinguishing them visually with stable per-device gradients
• creating phones, tablets, foldables, TVs, and Wear OS emulators
• selecting Android versions, variants, architecture, storage, RAM, SD card, and Google Play services options

Requirements

To build and run AvdBuddy from source, you need:

• macOS
• Xcode with command line tools (xcodebuild)

To use AvdBuddy with Android emulators, you also need:

• Android SDK command-line tools
• avdmanager
• sdkmanager
• Android Emulator
• adb

It looks for the SDK in:

• ANDROID_SDK_ROOT
• ANDROID_HOME
• ~/Library/Android/sdk

It reads AVDs from:

• ~/.android/avd

Installation

You can install AvdBuddy in either of these ways:

Download from GitHub Releases

Download the latest macOS DMG from GitHub Releases, then open AvdBuddy.app from /Applications.

Install with Homebrew

Install directly from the shared tap:

brew install --cask alexstyl/tap/avdbuddy

Or tap first, then install:

brew tap alexstyl/tap
brew install --cask avdbuddy

Homebrew installs AvdBuddy.app into /Applications.

Development

Run the test suite:

swift test

Run the project with the provided macOS script. It builds the AvdBuddy scheme in Debug and launches the app:

./scripts/runMac

Homebrew Packaging

AvdBuddy can be distributed as a Homebrew cask from a shared tap repository. Homebrew installs AvdBuddy.app into /Applications. The app still requires Android SDK tools on the machine in order to manage emulators.

To publish a Homebrew release:

• build and notarize the macOS DMG with ./scripts/releaseMac
• upload the versioned artifact, for example AvdBuddy-0.3.0.dmg, to GitHub Releases
• update the Homebrew cask in your shared tap repo, for example alexstyl/homebrew-tap, with the new version and sha256

The cask source for the tap is included in packaging/homebrew/avdbuddy.rb. A short setup guide lives in packaging/homebrew/README.md.

Credits

Inspired by VirtualBuddy.

License

MIT • Alex Styl (alexstyl)