Run AVD emulator without running Android Studio
It is possible to start an AVD emulator without having to first open Android Studio. Provided, of course, we've already created the emulator itself.
First, we need to get a list of all available AVD emulators in our machine:
$ ~/Library/Android/sdk/tools/bin/avdmanager list avd
This will return a big bunch of text, but we are only interested in the last part, so I recommend this instead:
$ ~/Library/Android/sdk/tools/bin/avdmanager list avd | grep -v -o Parsing.*
And the output will be something like this:
Name: Nexus_4_API_25
Device: Nexus 4 (Google)
Path: /Users/albertmata/.android/avd/Nexus_4_API_25.avd
Target: Google APIs (Google Inc.)
Based on: Android 7.1.1 (Nougat) Tag/ABI: google_apis/x86_64
Skin: nexus_4
Sdcard: 100M
---------
Name: Nexus_5X_API_27
Device: Nexus 5X (Google)
Path: /Users/albertmata/.android/avd/Nexus_5X_API_27.avd
Target: Google Play (Google Inc.)
Based on: Android API 27 Tag/ABI: google_apis_playstore/x86
Skin: nexus_5x
Sdcard: 100M
All we need now is the name of the emulator we want to run in order to execute this command:
$ ~/Library/Android/sdk/tools/emulator -avd Nexus_4_API_25
Please note the exact path to the tools
directory can be slightly different based on your original Android Studio installation.